László Koppány Csáji

University of Pécs (Hungary), Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology

This paper constitutes an attempt to unravel the complexity of ethnic levels and ethnonyms, and to outline the roles of “origin,” “language,” “locality,” and “social solidarity” in the ethnic identities of the Hunza, using the methods of anthropological studies on ethnicity, discourse analysis and cognitive semantics. The former kingdom of Hunza (now in the Pakistani controlled Kashmir). It is not obvious what one can call the ethnic level in Hunza. Ethnonyms do not have set definitions. There are overlapping categories of ethnic and quasi-ethnic perspectives. The notion that an ethnic group is based on a strict unit of origin, language, and territory seems to be false. Ethnic levels appear in constantly changing registers of personal knowledge, which only partially overlap. However, the discourse in which the inhabitants of Hunza express and experience their ethnic perceptions is an existing communicational frame, even if it contains relatively fluid and constantly changing elements of narratives, experiences, emotions, and values. The notion of Hunzakuts is seemingly a politonym, but it is also a local unit. The Burusho, Dom, Xik, Shina etc. are seemingly language based endonyms, but kinship, cultural relations, historical coexistence, administrative frames, language, and religiosity can all influence these ethnic perspectives. I delineated the essence of my explanation in a table, showing the complexity of ethnonyms used in social interactions. A native speaker has all these concepts in his or her mind, and in any particular situation, the relevant meanings are called forth. Ethnic identity is a set of different attachments, as frames of a person’s ethnic perceptions and behavior. Ethnicity is a kind of knowledge: participating in a discourse, sharing more or less common narratives, emotions, experiences, and values. Ethnicity is also a recognition: placing someone in the social environment, and it is also the foundation for meaningful and relevant relations. Finally, ethnicity is a practical tool of communication: ethnic perceptions and categories appear in conversation nearly always for a particular purpose.

Keywords: Hunza, Burushaski, Shina, Bericho, Wakhi, Pakistan, ethnicity, ethnonym, discourse analysis, cognitive semantics, nationalism

Introduction

When I arrived in the northern areas of Pakistan, I met a Wakhi-speaking man (a driver) in Gilgit, who introduced himself as a Hunzakuts (as an ethnic identity). He took me to Hunza, where I conducted anthropological fieldwork. My Hunzakuts hosts always mentioned him as an (ethnically) Wakhi driver, while my hosts referred to themselves sometimes as Burusho and other times as Hunzakuts. The driver took me to Sost (a town in Upper-Hunza), where his family told me they were Xiks, which was translated to English as Tajik.1 The outwardly confusing usage of the terms Burusho, Xik, Tajik, Hunzakuts, and Wahki focused my attention on the study of ethnic identity in Hunza. I realized that the categorization is much more complex than it seems at first, and the terms used in different situations depend on who refers whom, and what the particular context of the conversation is.

In recent decades, ethnicity studies have been dealing with questions like: are there definite categories (ethnonyms) of ethnic groups referring to members with existing collective “identities” (primordialism); or is the ethnic perspective rather a discourse, recalling patterns, emotions, and narratives from a constantly changing knowledge register (constructivism)? This paper is based on anthropological fieldwork,2 and it constitutes an attempt to outline the roles of “origin,” “language,” “locality,” and “social solidarity” in the ethnic identities of the Hunza. I use methods borrowed from anthropological studies on ethnicity, including discourse analysis and cognitive semantics. I focus both on endonyms and exonyms, but I also consider the historical background and the current political context, since the former kingdom of Hunza now belongs to the Pakistani controlled territory of Kashmir.3

Theoretical Frame and Methodology

The study of ethnicity became one of the most important fields of social anthropological studies with the release of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous essay, published as a small booklet, Race and History (1952). According to Lévi-Strauss, ethnicity and even ethnocentric attitudes are natural phenomena of humankind, as cultural diversity requires distinctions and categorization.4 He argues that ethnicity is an instinctive response to recognition of cultural diversity. The book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, edited by Frederik Barth and published in 1969, became another milestone. In his introduction, Hunza stresses that ethnic differences are emphasized (symbolically expressed and verbalized) at the boundaries of the ethnic groups, so ethnicity is based on social interaction.5 He argues that ethnic patterns and cultural reactions are based on interactions between social groups. Later, Rogers Brubaker wrote his famous work Ethnicity Without Groups,6 in which he reflects on the idea of Fredrik Barth, adding new aspects to the study of ethnicity and adopting a critical approach to “groupism.” Brubaker states that ethnic identity is not an objective, substantial frame into which one is born. According to his concept, “ethnic perception” is called forth by situations, so ethnicities are “not things in the world but perspectives on the world.”7 Brubaker contends that ethnicity is, rather, a discursive and fluid phenomenon, and its narratives and values depend on the personal emotions and the given situation in which it emerges.

We can distinguish the phenomenon of “ethnicity” from “nationalism,” although Anthony D. Smith emphasizes that the division is relative.8 Whether it had roots in the past or not, nationalism is a modern phenomenon, claiming legal self-determination (autonomy) for the presumed community: the nation. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers suggested that national frames are invented cultural constructions.9 Clifford Geertz claimed that nationalism is one of the modern ideologies, and it penetrates society as a political endeavor.10 Benedict Anderson used the term “imagined community” for a nation, identifying it as a constructed frame of modern political ideology.11 Brubaker emphasizes that ethnicity and nationalism should be approached not as some primordial form of identity or attachment, but rather “in terms of practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events.”12 Unlike nationalism, ethnicity is based on an instinctive ability to realize differences between social groups, based mostly on kinship or other discursive social units. This is why ethnicity can be built on several cognitive categories which mix origins (kinship), religious community, and legal and other distinctions (like language, locality etc.). Ethnicity can be described in a much more complex way, since (despite the one-level kind of nationalism, which claims only one unit, the nation, as a legitimate identity) ethnic terminology can use controversial and overlapping emic terms.

As a cultural and social anthropologist, I conduct fieldwork involving long-term participant observation among the social groups which I study, and I learn their languages to the extent that I am able during the given time frame of the research projects. For the present case study, I conducted my fieldwork in Hunza from June 2001 until September 2001, but I returned to the region in 2005, and since then I have remained in email communication with some of my friends there, so I frequently share information with my local informants (I must thank them for all the nuances to which they have drawn my attention). I extended my studies with interviews and I have also drawn on the scholarship on Hunza and the languages spoken there.

Throughout this paper, I often use the local Burushaski language emic terms for social and cultural phenomena, and for this reason, I use the orthography of Stephen R. Willson,13 which differs from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but may be read more easily by non-linguists and used for later studies about Hunza. When a particular emic term is not taken from the Burushaski language, I note this.

Site and Setting: Hunza

As a geographical territory, Hunza is located at the border between China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It is formed by Hunza, the only river which cuts across the Karakorum mountains in the Pakistani-controlled area of Kashmir. The former kingdom, also known as Hunza, was mostly on the right (north and west) side of the river.14 However, in some of the southern and northern parts of Hunza, the territory contains the opposite side of the bank. On the left (south and east) side of the Hunza River lies the former kingdom of Nagér (also called Nagyr or Nagar in some of the secondary literature). As the neighboring community of Hunzakuts, the Nagér residents are called Nagérkuts.15 Their folklore heritage is very similar to that of the Hunzakuts, and most of them also speak the Burushaski language (like another community in Yasin valley,16 far to the west, in the Hindu Raj mountains).17 They also call themselves Burusho. According to the 1998 Pakistani census, 46,665 persons lived in Hunza and 51,387 people in Nagér.

Most of the inhabited territory of the Hunza basin is below 3,000 meters, but around Hunza there are 33 peaks rising to altitudes of more than 7,300 meters.18 Only the high grasslands, which are used to feed cows, yaks, horses, buffalos, and goats in summertime, are higher, between 3,300 and 4,200 meters high. The famous Karakoram Highway,19 which links China and Pakistan, was the first road to reach the region in 1978. It crossed the Chinese border in 1982, and it was opened to foreigners in 1986.20 Until then, the area was accessible only through very high passes which were unsuitable for motor vehicles. Due to the mountainous landscape, in a wider sense the Hunza region is divided into many smaller valleys. The Chapursan Valley borders Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor, the Boiber Valley is located on the Chinese border, and the Shimshal Valley, which extends towards Baltistan, is near the ceasefire line between India and Pakistan, in the middle of the disputed Kashmir area.

In Burushaski, Hunzakuts (or in some dialects Húnzukuts) is both a singular and plural term for the inhabitants of Hunza.21 The Hunza society is based horizontally and territorially on khans,14 or local communities centered around fortified villages. While there are several khans, the first established khans are at the center of the Hunza society: Baltit (Karimabad), Altit, and Ganesh, which altogether (including all the cultivated land but excluding the summer pastures) comprises less than 30 square kilometers. The Hunza Kingdom extended its borders to the north and to the south, along the Hunza River in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,22 so today Hunza constitutes a much larger territory than before.23 Hunza society is built on the kinship system (as descent groups) and the khan system (as local groups). The region was traditionally divided among the khans (fortified hilltop towns and the surrounding territories). Before the twentieth century, Hunzakuts were not allowed to settle out of a khan. In the twentieth century, villages were established around the khans, since under British rule raids by the Nagérkuts were no longer a danger.24

There are many works about the Hunzakuts’ culture, their irrigation system, customs, shamanistic worldview and rituals, history, and language(s). Hunza receives an average of 130 millimeters of rain per year,25 so it is necessary to construct and maintain water-channels from the rivers of the Karakorum glaciers for agriculture.26 This centuries-old irrigation system brings the water supply and makes agriculture possible. As natives of the former kingdom, Hunzakuts are proud of their culture and of the fact that they are able to survive and cultivate their traditions in a highland mountain-desert environment. The concept of “one thousand years of independence” is also an element of the “Hunza-brand,”27 and it is given particular emphasis when this “brand” is presented to tourists, who began to come to the region from all over the world since the Karakorum Highway made the area more accessible.28

The Role of Language, Locality, and Social Structures as the Foundations of Ethnic Levels in Hunza

It is not obvious how one might recognize “the” ethnic level in Hunza, if one were to insist on looking for a one-level model. As a consequence, “the” ethnic terms are also uncertain. Several more or less overlapping local, linguistic, social, and religious categorization can be observed, seemingly with contradictions. In the secondary literature on ethnos and ethnicity, the most common named potential principles are29 language, locality, “origin” (descendance), and social solidarity. I demonstrate in the following that these principles of criteria yield recognitions of different sets of people. Inhabitants of Hunza certainly use terms based on locality or language or political order etc., but the “groups” to which they seek to refer do not overlap. Furthermore, the same word can refer to different people depending on context.

In some situations, Burusho seems a widely used we/they distinction, i.e. someone is referring to linguistic difference, although whether this word in the given situation means the Burushaski speakers in Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, or simply all of them depends on the context in which it is being used.

Locality is another foundation of ethnic categorization. The former kingdoms of Nagér and Hunza form the most important local frames of ethnic identities, but I have heard inhabitants of Hunza refer to Hunzakuts as their common local identity many times, and I participated in a conversation in Ganesh, in which a Burusho man said “the Hunzakuts’ musicians are the Bericho people, who are from the South.” Even if Bericho are usually regarded as a part of the Hunzakuts, in this context Hunzakuts referred to Burusho (and opposed to Bericho), so Burusho people sometimes use the word Hunzakuts to mean “Burusho speakers of Hunza.” Wakhi people, most of whom live in “Upper Hunza” (the territory north of Karimabad), rarely refer to themselves as Hunzakuts, but when they are out of Hunza (e.g. in Gilgit) they identify themselves as Hunzakuts in their interactions with Shina speaking locals.

Hunzakuts never supposed that they had common origin, even if the image of the “thousand-year-old Hunza kingdom” is a core part of the narrative of Hunza identity. On the one hand, they refer to this as a shared element of the cultural history of the Hunzakuts, but on the other, everyone knows that the origins of Hunza society are very diverse. The people(s) of Hunza often give expression to their pride in their cultural and linguistic diversity (“multi-colored unit”), particularly in interactions with foreigners and as part of political events, and this multicultural frame is also part of the “Hunza identity” and semantic frame.30 The increasingly important indigenous discourse31 does not exclude the narratives of “later waves.” I have heard many times that the “Burusho people are indigenous in Hunza,” but on some occasions I also heard that “the highest status of Burusho people is the Diramiting phratry (the Tharákuts and Waziírkuts clans), who came from Gilgit” and became the ruling class. The Bericho, a subgroup of the Hunzakuts, are a conspicuously collecting frame, into which any occupational group or family to settle in Hunza was integrated, so I heard many times that the “Bericho are from all around the Indian subcontinent or from even more distant regions.”

In order to further a more nuanced understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of the ethnic terminology in use in Hunza, I identify the following elements as potential distinguishing features among different groups (which could be characterized as “ethnic” groups):religions, spoken languages, political frames, descent groups, social stratification and solidarity, and territorial/local subgroups of Hunza. Each of these elements has some impact on the ethnic perspective, but none of them could be chosen as “the” ethnic level.

 

Hunza is widely characterized, both in Hunza and by people living beyond its bounds, as “an Ismaili territory.” Hunzakuts identity is strongly connected with Ismaili Islam32 in many situations. The tourist brand of Hunza is also built on “Ismailism.” All inhabitants of Hunza, Nagér and Yasin adopted Islam several centuries ago. The peoples of Hunza were converted in the sixteenth century,33 but they retained many of their earlier beliefs. Most Hunzakuts converted to (or were converted from) Ismaili Islam from their former Shia faith at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, the population is predominantly Ismaili in Hunza and Yasin, but a strong minority (around 10-15 percent) is Shiite/Shia (Shía)34 and a very small minority (1-2%) is Sunni.35 The Shia (Shi’ite) minority live in religious endogamy and often in local units in Ganish, Dorkhan, Garelt, and parts of Aliabad and Murtazabad. Once, a Shia Hunzakuts told me that they are the “proper” Hunzakuts “who did not leave their faith.” He meant that other Hunzakuts converted from their Shia faith to Ismaili Islam. Endogamy functions as a survival strategy: this is how they try to keep their religious identity relatively untouched by the majority of Ismailis.

Most Shia people live in the southern parts of Hunza and some in Central Hunza (in Ganesh). Most of the Shias in Hunza self-identify as members of the Shina people (see below), except those who live in Central Hunza. Shinas live in the neighboring territories (in Nagér and Gilgit) as well, where they form a majority. Burusho people are predominantly Shias in Nagér,36 which is on the opposite side of the Hunza River. There are very few Sunnite Muslims (Sunni) here, and they are (or are regarded as) “newcomers,” who came from places in the south of Pakistan. In a Hunzakuts’ cognitive semantic frame,37 “Sunni Muslim” means nearly the same as Punjabi or Pakistani outlander in Hunza, or at least these notions are strongly connected. I have heard people say “he is a Sunni,” as a reference to a person’s outlander inhabitant status. I have also heard Ismaili and Shia people share many jokes and rumors, laughing at each other’s habits, customs and values, and this has strengthened my conviction that religious identity works very much like ethnic identity in this region38.

There is a rivalry between the Shia and Ismaili people in Hunza, and they form endogamous communities, with rare examples of intermarriage. However, I have only once heard someone say that “Ganish people are not ‘typical’ Hunzakuts, since they are Shia.” This shows the strong connection between religious and ethnic identities and the stereotypes based on these identities.

The Five Languages Spoken in the Geographical Hunza Region

Burushaski (or as it is also called, Misháaski, which means “our way/speech”) is the main (official) language, spoken by virtually everyone who lives in Hunza, whether as the mother tongue or as a second language. Burushaski is said not to be related to any other language in the world.39 Some linguists have tried to demonstrate parallels between Burushaski and some Paleo-Siberian languages (e.g. Ket).40 With a very rough estimation, there are between 30,000 and 40,000 native speakers (Burusho) of Burushaski in Hunza.

Shina (it is an endonym; in Burushaski it is Ṣhenaá) is a Dardic language, related to Khowar, Kalash, Kashmiri, and Kohistani languages. These languages belong to the Indo-European language family.41 Shina speakers form the vast majority in Gilgit, Chilas, the lower Ghizar valley, Haramosh, Diamir, and the Ishkoman region (to the south and west of Hunza). They numbered 2,084,673 according to the 2004 Pakistani census (and nearly 200,000 in India). Shina has many dialects in and around Hunza, such as Astir, Gilgiti, and Kohistani.42 As a Shina diaspora, between 12,000 and 15,000 Shinas live in Hunza. They belong to the Yeshkun, Kamin, and Shin subgroups, and they speak different Shina dialects. Sometimes, Dom (in Burushaski Bericho) is also mentioned as a fourth Shina community. Shins have the highest status among them. Most Shinas are Shia Muslims, but in some villages they are Ismaili (especially to the west of Gilgit, so a bit far from Hunza). The Shina converted to Islam during in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until then, most of them were Hindu (and some were Buddhists).43 I have a Shina friend who sometimes introduces himself as Hunzakuts and sometimes as Shina, depending on the circumstances and audience, and I have the impression that these ethnic identities have never been in contradiction.

 

The Wakhi (in some works: Waqhi) language is related to Tajik and Sarakol (both are in the Pamiri language group, which belongs to the Iranian Branch of the Indo-European language family). They came to Hunza from the north (from Wakhan) and were mostly pastors (herding cows, goats and yaks). Wakhi is an exonym. In Burushaski, the term used is Guitso (beside Wakhi) and the language is called Guíchiski. The Wakhi people are known as Guyits/Guicho or (depending on the territory in which they live in Hunza) Gujali (the Farsi word Wakhani is also in use, alongside the English term Wakhi). The endonym for the people is X̌ik (or Xik zik, and in some sources Khik, Zik or Xik), and the term Xikwar is used as a designation for their native language. The suffix -wor/war refers to the language. It comes from the name of the Amudarja (Oxus) River, which is Waxša in Wakhi. Most of the Wakhi live in Gujal/Gojal, which was occupied by Hunza in the eighteenth century, and Wakhis migrated there later (to preserve their Shia faith in the face of Sunni expansion in Badakshan). They form the majority of the population in Gojal, with between 8,000 and 9,000 people. Wakhis belong to Ismaili Islam in Hunza. They sometimes refer to themselves as Pamiri or Tajik. The Wakhi language is considered as a dialect of Tajik in Tajikistan, and they are counted among the Tajik minorities abroad. Today, Wakhis are settled farmers, who plant grain and vegetables (and potatoes beginning in the 1970s), but some of them continue to practice transhumance (a form of pastoralism that involves moving livestock by a specialized group, from one grazing area to another according to a seasonal cycle; among the Wakhi, this work is done mostly by women).

The Bericho, or in their own language Dom,44 people speak Doma, Domáaki, or Dumaki Beriski (in Burushaski Beriski). Domaaki is a Dardic language45 spoken only in Hunza. It is spoken mostly by the villagers of Berishal (Moominabad) and some in Dorkhal (near Baltit). They number roughly 700, living in approximately 100 households (half of which are in Moominabad, while the others are in other villages).46 The Bericho people are Ismaili Muslims.47 They do not claim a common origin unique to their group. There is evidence that musicians, blacksmiths, and craftsmen who wanted to settle in Hunza in the past were integrated into the Bericho community,48 formed a new lineage, and adopted the Domaki language (in addition to Burushaski as the main regional language). The Bericho own and rent out most of the tractors for plowing nowadays. The current clans of Doms are Majun, Dishil, Ashur, Bak, Gulbeg, and Mishkin).49 Given the similarities between the lifestyles and cultures of the Bericho and Burusho peoples today, many Hunzakuts sometimes call the Bericho “Burusho.”50

 

In addition to the four native languages, there are three other important languages which Hunzakuts learn in schools as languages of interaction with non-Hunzakuts:

Urdu is spoken by the Pakistani administration and today is learned by all Hunzakuts in elementary school. It has been the lingua franca in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir since the 1970s.

As a “traditional” lingua franca in the region, Farsi (Persian) was taught in schools until 1974, and since then, it has remained an educational language for secondary school pupils. Urdu is taught in elementary and secondary school.

Beginning in the 1980s, many Hunzakuts began to learn and use English, parallel to growth in the tourist industry.

Most Hunzakuts speak at least three languages (including their mother tongue). Illiteracy is also very low, since there were schools for children (teaching Farsi) long before the British Empire came to the region in the nineteenth century. Arabic was also used for religious purposes, but it was spoken by only a few people (the religious and cultural elite) in Hunza.

 

There were three political frames for Burushaski-speaking people: one is Hunza, another is Nagér, and the third is Yasin (to the west). All the three territories were independent kingdoms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Hunza and Nagér kingdoms were rivals, and each launched raids against the other.51 The inhabitants of the two areas usually consider themselves enemies even today. There were several small kingdoms in the region: Gilgit, Ishkoman, Yasin, the kingdoms of Baltistan (Shigar, Kapalu, Shkardu etc.), the Chinese administration in Tashkurgan, etc. Foreign sources also called the kingdom of Hunza Biltum, Khajuna, and Kunjut.52

Hunza was in a politically fragmented space until Kashmir’s Sikh maharaja tried to occupy more and more territories of the Karakorum and Hindukush in the nineteenth century, though he failed to do so in Hunza and Nagér. I have heard many narratives (as oral history) about the cruelty of the Sikh army, but it is hard to distinguish between the narratives recently constructed as part of Pakistani propaganda for the Kashmir war (ongoing since 1947) and the real legends (folk narratives), the origins of which lie in the nineteenth century.

After 1892, as a result of the period of the Great Game,53 Hunza and Nagér became semi-independent princely states of the British Empire, and they remained in this status until 1947, when they were integrated into Pakistan. The tham (emic term for king) was from the Ayasho family, but the dynasty lost power in 1974 according to administrative reforms introduced by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Today, efforts are being made to strengthen a new political frame: “Pakistan,” which is not widely accepted by the peoples of Hunza as their “real” nation. I have frequently heard the contention that “Hunza, Nagér and Gilgit are occupied territories, and not «natural» parts of Pakistan”. Hunzakuts often demonstrate their independence by listening to music on Indian radio channels, by stressing that although the homeland of polo (a traditional equestrian game in Hunza) is the northern areas of Pakistan, Hunzakuts or members of the Gilgit people are not allowed to play on the national team. I have often heard characterizations of the Sunni majority and the Urdu-speaking administration as the “new colonialists.” So the construction of a Pakistani nation so far has not met with much success in Hunza, even if the schools teach the official “nationalized” education and narratives. Most of the Hunzakuts resist this effort as part of “Sunni propaganda of Pakistan.” Religion, political semi-integration, different cultural roots cause mostly passive resistance to the Pakistani nation-ideology in Hunza. Despite this, I have heard of Hunzakuts introducing themselves in Europe as Pakistani people. Certainly this must have been motivated in part by a consideration of communicative rationality, i.e. an awareness that Hunza is not widely known outside of Pakistan, so they identify themselves abroad as Pakistanis or Hunzakuts from Pakistan.

Hunza and Nagér always found themselves in a fluid political field in recent centuries, and they tried quite successfully to maintain their independence. Just to mention the closest neighborhood in the south, there were the many Baltistani states and Gilgit kingdom. To the west, there was Ishkoman and Ghizar, and further west there was Yasin. In the north, there was the Wakhan part of Badakshan and Tashkurgan, and to the east Little Tibet (Ladakh and Zanskar). The Shina people came from the direction of Gilgit, Wakhis from the north, from Wakhan, and the origins of the Bericho people (according to the oral history) lie somewhere in Baltistan (they were given as a wedding dowry to the thám of Hunza long ago).54

 

Hunzakuts have a patrilineal kinship system. Burusho of the former kingdom of Hunza is traditionally divided into lineages, clans and phratries,55 as a kinship categorization.

The smallest group above the family is qhaanadáan, which means “lineage.” Lineage is a unilineal kinship group, in which the members trace their descent from a person (e.g. from a great-grandfather). Lineages form a changeable set, and sometimes have special names, but they are specifically based on their founder.

The clan (guṭí, plural: guṭénts) contains two or more lineages. A synonymous term is jót qabiilá, which means “small phratry.” Members of a clan cannot easily trace their common ancestor, but they often refer to him as the founder. Clans have names, like Tharákuts, Béegkuts, Mamétkuts, Haríkuts, Faráat, Béegkuts etc. Clans are stabile parts of the kinship system, and exist for many generations.

The term roóm (in some dialects ruúm, but it is also often called qabiila), means phratry. David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer, the noted linguist who undertook research in the late 1920s and 1930s which has since become a mainstay of the secondary literature, identified the Burushaski term ruúm as “tribe.”56 However, recently cultural anthropologists have agreed that this definition is not accurate.57 Summer pastures are shared between the phratries (and not the local units of the khans58). Phratries have special names, like Dirámiting, Buróong, Barátaling, Qhúrukuts etc.59

Bericho, Shina and Wakhi peoples have different kinship systems and social structures, but they are unimportant from the perspective of my inquiry.

 

In addition to the lineage and phratry system, I outline social stratification according to status and solidarity. According to social status, the Hunzakuts’ society is divided vertically into three main levels.

The highest status is the Ayasho family, which belongs to the Tharákuts clan, and, together with the Waziírkuts, forms the Diramiting phratry.60 They have the highest status.61

The second group is the Burusho people, who are often regarded as the so-called “folk”: the native, Burushaski speaking inhabitants of Hunza. According to oral history narratives, they are the indigenous people of the region, and the Diramiting phratry are the conquering rulers of Hunza. The Burusho people are in the middle of the social hierarchy.

The third group is divided into three communities, each of which speaks its own language: Shina, Wakhi and (in the lowest status62), the Bericho.

Since the mid-1970s, the Pakistani administration, and later (since the 1980s), the slowly established tourist industry began bringing more and more people from Pakistan to Hunza, but these people still form only a slight minority of the society. They are considered outlanders, who are not Hunzakuts. As an form of opposition to the Pakistani administration and politics, Hunzakuts still resist sharing the nation concept of Pakistan. Many times, Hunzakuts have told me that “Pakistanis do not consider us equal citizens, as evidenced by the fact that Pakistanis do not let us play on the national Pakistani polo or soccer teams”. However, as noted earlier in this article, Hunzakuts often identify themselves as Pakistani when they are outside Pakistan63.

Ethnicity Emerging in Context

In the preceding section I outlined the main social units and groups in Hunza. In this one, I draw on this and give examples of in-situ conversations in which people use the relevant terms. Basically, I seek to show that one must always consider the context of the given situation. Whether a conversation takes place inside or outside Hunza is one important element, and it is similarly important to take into consideration who is using the exact terms, to whom he or she is referring, and the audience to or with whom he or she is speaking. Contextualization is essential if interpretation is going to be adequate, so I give some examples of the everyday use of the ethnic terminology.

Before beginning to outline the ethnic levels and ethnonyms in Hunza, I must stress that people do not always act from their “ethnic perspective.”64 In some respects, Hunzakuts have a lifestyle (agriculture, working on the irrigation system, animal husbandry) which is very similar to the lifestyles of other Shia and Ismaili peoples in the region of the Karakorum and Hindukush. They have many distinctive customs, some of which can be easily recognized, but cultural differences cannot be equated with ethnicity. As culture is never homogeneous and always changing (as it is a cognition), it can be considered a kind of discourse. Several social, religious, and other orientations (e.g. school, avocation or special interest-based groups) can give frames for different discourse spaces and lead to the emergence of more or less overlapping systems of “culture.” Which is ethnicity, if ethnic roots do not trace the same directions whether according to cultural, kinship (origin), religious, or territorial (local) identities?

As it is theoretically based on the notion of origin, language, and cultural or political coexistence, ethnicity emerges only in some situations, when one or more of these values are affected. On other occasions, religious or social identity provides the foundation of their actual perspective. Kinship can also have an important role, even today. However, ethnic perspective cannot be easily divided from religious, social, local, and kinship cognition. It is the ideology of nationalism, which tries to give a one-level frame of a particular ethnic level, tending to exclude multi-ethnic identities and rule over religious, political, and cultural identities. In Hunza, this “nationalistic turn” has not yet taken place, since Pakistani nationalism has been failed to control ethnic cognitions.65

It was surprising to me that I found a complex terminology for “ethnicity” in the Burushaski language. In the Burusaski language, the word qáum means “ethnic group,” but it can refer to two different categories: (1.) “a traditionally formed community with a common geography, culture, and history,” and (2) “a group of people speaking the same language and living in a similar kinship system.”66 In the case of Hunza, the first term is Hunzakuts qáum, the second (language-based) term is Burusho qáum. Inhabitants of the former kingdom of Nagér (Nagérkuts/Nagarkuts) also belong to the Burusho qáum, but certainly do not belong to the Hunzakuts qáum.

Theoretically, it would be easy to distinguish these meanings of qáum, but sometimes the words Hunzakuts and Burusho mean something different, and some Hunzakuts use other terms for the qáum to which they want to. The speakers of a language do not automatically refer to one qáum, as people normally speak three or more languages (Hunza is a multi-lingual territory), and sometimes they speak Burushaski better than their mother tongue.

Native speakers of the same language can be intermixed according to political frames: if the word Burusho is mentioned in Hunza, people will not automatically think about Nagér and Yasin Burusho people as well. Mostly, the word refers only to the Burusho people in Hunza. In some contexts, the word Burusho even excludes the Burushaski speaking elite and means only the Burushaski speaking Burusho folk in Hunza.

If the word Burusho is mentioned outside Hunza, it often refers to Hunza’s, Nagér’s, and Yasin’s Burushaski speakers, but not exclusively. Sometimes it means simply “those who speak Burushaski,” and sometimes, depending on the context is so the conversation can refer to Burusho in Hunza without drawing any distinctions. Other times, they extend it with the Hunza’s reference adjective: “Hunzakts Burusho.”

The word Hunzakuts is similarly complex. It usually refers to a territorial frame (a local unit of people), but sometimes Hunzakuts means only Burushaski speaking people in Hunza, e.g. when it is mentioned by a Wakhi to another Wakhi outside Hunza.

In the case of Shinas and Wakhis, ethnic considerations are even more complex, as they both have neighboring territories in which they form majorities, thus their presence points out the origins of Hunnza. Shinas in Gilgit and Wakhis in the Wakhan corridor of Afghanistan have their own “original homeland.” In most of the conversations I have observed, they consciously stressed their Shina or Wakhi identity, and very rarely mentioned Hunzakuts identity, even if – theoretically – the Hunza regional identity covers all of them as well, and they can also refer to themselves as “Hunzakuts,” especially when they refer to it towards non-Wakhi or non-Shina outsiders. And they are quite proud of both their Hunzakuts and Shina or Wakhi identity. On other occasions, they can simply identify themselves as Shina or Wakhi, within the Shina or Wakhi speaking communities in the northern areas, if they want to stress their community with other Shinas or Wakhis or they want to refer to their language.

The case of the Berichos is a bit different, as they do not have a “homeland,” and they consider themselves traditional Hunzakuts without being a part of the Hunza kinship system. They had semi-slave status until the twentieth century, so they had communal emotions because they were an integrated part of Hunza, occupying a niche of occupations (blacksmith, musician, tractor-owners etc.). I have never heard them saying that they were Burusho, but they referred to themselves as Hunzakuts many times, at least when they were out of Hunza (e.g. in Gilgit).

An ethnonym can refer to a political frame, a language community, or a political and linguistic frame. Ethnic levels are often different when seen from the outside (exonyms) and when seen from the inside (endonyms), so one must also briefly analyze the terms used by people who describe or name these groups from the outside. Non-Hunzakuts often refer to Hunzakuts with the term Hunzas in English or similar terms in other languages.

The admixture of ethnic levels outside Hunza is more confusing. To simplify, Wakhis belong to a Wakhi ethnic group, Shinas to a Shina ethnic group, and so on. But then where do the Burusho or the Hunzakuts belong? How can we consider the Ismaili institutions, which reach towards political and language frames and cause strict endogamy, stricter than the language or even the phratry system? In practice, it is preferable for a Shina woman to marry a Shia Burusho man than to marry an Ismaili Shina. Religious frames can be more important in the case of ethnocentric expressions as well. I have heard many jokes told by Shia Muslims about their Ismaili neighbors, even when they shared the same language. These jokes contained stereotypes, concerning for instance ethnocentric attitudes and behavior. Many cultural patterns are shared by religious groups, but not by linguistic or local ones. A Burusho who is Shia can have many customs and rules in common with a Shia person in Gilgit, more than she/he might with her/his Ismaili neighbors in Hunza. So one cannot forget the region’s cultural and religious diversity when attempting to analyze or interpret these terms.

Levels of Ethnicity and the Relativity of Ethnonyms

In the previous sections I outlined the linguistic and social diversity of Hunza and the local categories which also influence ethnic cognitions. In this one, I summarize the Hunzakuts’ ethnic terminology in a table. The lines of the table list the native language groups and also some geographical and political frames. Each line starts with the subject who is referring to someone (named in the columns). Terms (written in the following columns) show a set of possible emic words for the ethnic or linguistic group (to whom the speakers refer).

To avoid misunderstanding, I have used changes in formatting. Words with normal characters refer to peoples; words in italics are terms for languages spoken by the people in question; the most common words are written with bold letters. As a reduced matrix67 of endonyms and exonyms, the table is based on linguistic differences in Hunza. It is extended with the categories of Pakistani and Nagérkuts as important complementary categories of the locality, but even so, the table is a simplification, since it cannot adequately emphasize the role of locality. This is why I explained the considerations above, to demonstrate that the table can be interpreted only according to the complexity of the social structure of Hunza. The several “synonymous” words in a heading all have different semantic frames and relevance.

I only use English words in the table if I have heard them used in a native conversation, they were explained in ethnographic interviews, or I have data about their usage from written sources. The table demonstrates the multi-dimension of endonyms, exonyms, and politonyms. The variety of ethnonyms in each headings shows that the terms can be used in a given situation according to their relevance. The areal linguistic interactions are also easy to recognize (e.g. from the frequent loan-words).

Conclusions

The notion that an ethnic group is based on a strict unit of origin, language, and territory seems to be false. Ethnic levels appear in constantly changing registers of personal knowledge, which only partially overlap. However, the discourse in which the inhabitants of Hunza express and experience their ethnic perceptions is an existing communicational frame, even if it contains relatively fluid and constantly changing elements of narratives, experiences, emotions, and values. This dialectic set of cognitions explains the very complex ethnic terminology of Hunza.

It is not obvious what one can call the ethnic level in Hunza. Ethnonyms do not have set definitions, and in different situations only the context can help us understanding who a term is being used to designate. There are overlapping categories of ethnic and quasi-ethnic perspectives. I have analyzed the role of language, locality, descendant, and social structure. The first consequence is that, on the basis of these principles, very different groups of people share common ethnic identities.

I explained that the notion of Hunzakuts is seemingly a politonym, but it is also a local unit. The Burusho, Dom, Xik, Shina etc. are seemingly language based endonyms, but kinship, cultural relations, historical coexistence, administrative frames, language, and religiosity can all influence these ethnic perspectives (although none of them can be considered as “the sole and only” ethnic level). I showed that the term Burusho, for example, can mean all Burushaski speakers, but sometimes it means the folk of Hunza (opposed to the Diramiting elite) and sometimes it means Burushaski speakers of Hunza. It is also used, in other contexts, to refer to the distant Burushaski speaking populations of Nagér and Yasin, and there are cases in which it is simplified to the Ismaili Muslims of Hunza and Yasin. A native speaker has all these concepts in his o rher mind, and in any particular situation, the relevant meanings are called forth. The context can be interpreted with the tools of the cognitive semantics.

There are institutions (such as clans and phratries, Ismaili religious community, and local settlement frames like khanats), into which someone is born, so there are groups which allocate ethnic perspectives. Ethnic identity is far from being incidental. It is, rather, a set of different attachments, as frames of a person’s ethnic perceptions and behavior. Ethnicity is a kind of knowledge: participating in a discourse, sharing more or less common narratives, emotions, experiences, and values. Ethnicity is also a recognition: placing someone in the social environment (according to linguistic, local and other difference), and it is also the foundation for meaningful and relevant relations. Finally, ethnicity is a practical tool of communication: ethnic perceptions and categories appear in conversation nearly always for a particular purpose.

The question of which languages are used in the family is also not incidental, and neither is the question of the society to which someone belongs. These factors can sometimes be changed (by moving out of Hunza, emigration, intermarriage etc.), but there must be a reason for this change. It seems insufficient to consider ethnicity “merely” a changeable discourse, although the ethnic perspective is indeed a constantly changing (and never homogeneous) register of knowledge.

Ethnic identity in Hunza contains the concept of the former Hunza kingdom (the “thousand years of independence”), but it does not suppose or imply any common origin. Inhabitants of Hunza recognize the role of native languages, local communities, and social coexistence. Social and religious differences can lead to expressions of identity that are similar to or part of ethnic perceptions. Inhabitants of Hunza certainly recognize differences in language, and they use several words for the linguistic groups. Despite the linguistic diversity and the current political power of the nation-state ideology of modern Pakistan, Hunzakuts identity survived the collapse of the former kingdom’s administration in 1974. The semantic frame of the word Hunzakuts has certainly undergone a transformation since 1974, and the role of locality has increased. Social solidarity remained an important part of it.

I delineated the essence of my explanation in a table, showing the complexity of ethnonyms used in social interactions. In addition to their (etic) vocabulary meanings, the ethnic terminology (as a set of emic categories) catalyzes other notions, narratives, and emotions. Each word has a cognitive semantical frame, which calls forth emotions, narratives, and values in the given situation by the exact actors.68

After briefly outlining the complexity of the ethnonym-system in Hunza, according to which terms can be recalled on the basis of the given circumstances, I demonstrated the complexity of ethnic levels and perceptions (Table I.). As the diversity and overlapping nature of ethnic perceptions, ethnic discourses, and semantic frames suggests, there is no single, exclusive level of ethnonyms in Hunza. Finally, I emphasize that cognition of “ethnic categories” is not omnipotent. There are considerations in which the national (Pakistan), ecological (social status), religious, or the political attachments seems more relevant than the ethnic ones.

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Who is naming whom?	Burusho (in Hunza)	Shina	Wakhi	Bericho (Dom)	Nagérkuts (Burusho in Nagér)	Pakistani
Burusho (in Hunza)	Burusho Misháaski Burushaski Húnzó Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts Buru / Bru (Biltum Khajuna Kanjut/Kunjut1) (Werchikvar/ Wirchikwor2)	Shenaá Shená Shina Shinaki Húnzukuts (for Shinas in Hunza) Nagérkuts/ Nagarkuts (for Shinas in Nagér)	Guítso/Guicho Gujali/Gojali Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts Guyits Guíchiski Waqhí Xikwor/Xikwar Wakhani	Bericho Béri Bériski Berits Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts Berishal sís Burusho	Burusho Burushaski Nagérkuts	Urdu Panjabi (often extended to all Pakistanis) Pakistani Paki (English loanword)
Shina	Hunzakuts Buru / Bru Burushaski Burusho	Shiná Shinaki Shina Hunzakuts	Húnzukuts Gujali/Gojali Waqhí Wakhi Xikwor, Xikwar Wakhani	Dom Bericho Bériski Domaki Béri Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts	Burusho Nagér/Nagyr Burushaski Nagérkuts Nagiri	Urdu Panjabi (often extended to Pakistanis) Pakistani Paki
Wakhi	Buru Burusho Hunzakuts Burushaski	Shina Shina Shinaki Hunzakuts	Xik zik Zik, Khik Xikwa Wakhíní Húnzukuts Pamiri Tajik	Bériski Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts Bericho Dom	Nagérkuts Nagar/Nagyr Burushaski Buru	Urdu Pakistani
Bericho (Dom)	Buru, Bru, Burusho, Burushaski Hunzúkuts	Shiná Shina Shinaki Hunzakuts	Guítso/Guicho Hunzakuts / Húnzukuts Guíchiski Waqhí Xikwor, Xikwar Wakhani	Dom Doma Domáaki Dumaki Bérits Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts	Burusho Nagér/Nagyr Burushaski Nagérkuts Nagiri	Urdu Panjabi (often extended to all Pakistanis) Pakistani
Nagérkuts (Burusho in Nagér)	Burusho Misháaski Burushaski Werchikvar/ Wirchikwor (for Yasin-Burusho) Buru / Bru	Shenaá/Shená Shina Shinaki Húnzukuts (for Shinas in Hunza) Nagérkuts/ Nagarkuts (for Shinas in Nagér)	Guítso/Guicho Guíchiski Waqhí Xikwor/Xikwar Wakhani	Bericho Béri Bériski Hunzakuts/ Húnzukuts	Burusho Misháaski Burushaski Nagérkuts/ Hanarkuts Werchikvar/ Wirchikwor (for Yasin-Burusho) Buru / Bru	Urdu Pakistani
Pakistani	Hunzakuts Burusho Burushaski Hunzai	Shina Húnzukuts Nagérkuts Nagarkuts	Wakhi/Waqhí Hunzakuts Hunzai Wakhani Tajik	Dom Bericho Domaki Bériski Hunzakuts	Nagari Nagérkuts Burusho Burushaski	Pakistani Urdu etc.
1 The words Biltum, Khajuna, and Kanjut/Kunjut sometimes appear in Burushaski conversations with a connotation concerning their historical roots. 2 Werchikvor/Werchikvar refers to the Burushaski dialect spoken in Yasin.

 

Table I. Endonyms and exonyms in and around Hunza

State-Building, Imperial Science, and Bourgeois Careers in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 1848 Generation: The Cases of Karl Czoernig (1804–1889) and Carl Alexander von Hügel (1795/96–1870)

Wolfgang Göderle
University of Graz
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The article situates itself in the broader context of the transition between the Ancien Régime and the revolutionary year 1848 by exploring the new social spaces opening up for a middle-class in the making from the 1820s onward. It focuses on two representatives of this new class, Karl von Czoernig and Carl Alexander von Hügel, both of whom managed to climb the social ladder between c. 1820 and 1870. Men like Czoernig and Hügel were involved with the events of 1848 in manifold ways. Czoernig, for instance, was a member of the Frankfurt Parliament, while Hügel helped Metternich escape the country and flee to England. Yet in the wider perspective, it was not a few turbulent days in 1848 that made a difference in the lives of the members of the larger emerging middle-class to which these two men belonged. The revolution(s) had another effect on both men’s lives: Hügel made a reappearance as an imperial diplomat and started a second career with a distinctly conservative flavor. The top-ranking civil servant Czoernig, in contrast, ruined his professional career in the long run, although the consequences of his participation in the events of 1848 were not felt until the early 1860s, when dusk fell on neo-absolutist liberalism. This article examines a panorama of new options and opportunities for members of the well-educated bourgeois in an era of transition, and it suggests some conclusions concerning the strategies put to use by the emerging middle-class.

Keywords: Habsburg Monarchy, civil service, middle-class, bourgeoisie, social history, nineteenth century

Who were the men of 1848 in Central Europe?* Was there even such a thing as a generation of 1848? If one seeks answers to these questions, one must dig deeper into the institutional and personal continuities that link the first and second halves of the nineteenth century in the Habsburg Empire. An understanding of these continuities sheds light on processes of state-building and the rise of a bourgeois middle class, the worldviews of which were claiming ground in imperial notions of the modern state.1

The following article proceeds on the assumption that there actually was a generation of 1848, made up roughly of men born between c. 1795 and 1810 who shared a certain horizon of education, experiences, and relationships both with one another and with the state and its institutions. This generation included not only those directly involved with the manifold events in the revolutionary year, but also men whose lives were in many ways affected. Members of the generation of 1848 were not necessarily in favor of more political participation or liberalism. Some, indeed, were strictly opposed, and some were more or less indifferent. Yet (and this is the decisive point) their lives and life choices were affected by the changes that led to and were ushered in by the revolutions, and they all had to deal with 1848 in one way or another. This article relates this generation of 1848 to three aspects that have increasingly received scholarly attention in recent years: (a) the question of networks in an asserted “world of empires” and the (b) production of scientific knowledge, in large part by members of an emerging middle class, specifically in the (c) context of state-building processes.2

This text summarizes the current state of research in an ongoing project which seeks to reconstruct and analyze a collective biography of Central European civil servants between c. 1820 and c. 1870. The endeavor aims to produce a thorough investigation of the personal, professional, and educational backgrounds of these individuals, the process of social change in which they participated, and the manifold networks of which they were a part.3 Here, I will present two men who were active in what was then known as the “Austrian Empire.” Their cases shed light on larger imperial practices and the mid-century construction of imperial spaces.4 At first glance, Czoernig and von Hügel had little in common, apart from the fact that both served the Habsburg Empire at one point or another; however, I argue that together these two men’s careers offer illustrative examples of the field of professional choices, options, and chances to rise in the social hierarchy for members of the middle class in the empire. To a certain extent, their lives complement each other and cover a broader range of the array of bourgeois, or, to a growing extent, middle class backgrounds in the first half of the nineteenth century.5

Christopher Clark characterizes the decade after 1848 as a “European Revolution in Government.”6 I argue that the emerging middle classes in Central Europe and beyond acted as catalyzers in the setup and flow of this process.7 They provided synchronization and know-how transfer across European states and empires, they built and maintained crucial formations of administrative and scientific knowledge, and they laid the foundation stones for what was to become the “modern state” of the 1850s.

Science and the Modern State

The past few years have seen a certain reassessment of the first half of the nineteenth century in Central Europe, although the pre-March decades have received relatively little scholarly attention compared to works on the second half of the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries.8 A number of studies, however, highlight subtle lines of continuity, showing the elements of the late eighteenth century on which the generation of 1848 could build.9 The rank smell of reactionary rule and philistine Biedermeier is slowly coming off the period between 1815 and 1848 and giving way to a more differentiated and balanced assessment.10

I argue that emerging middle classes in Central Europe and beyond were laying the groundwork for the rebuilding of the political, economic, social, and cultural arena after 1848 during most of the first half of the nineteenth century, gradually replacing older elites in what has been coined the “imperial intermediaries” by Burbank and Cooper.11 Preeminent members of this bourgeoisie were smoothly blending the ambition of the well-educated social riser with the eloquence, manners, and social instinct of older aristocratic elites, whose etiquette and networking habits and skills they were simulating masterfully. The services of these men, whose skills and competences concerning the systematic production and management of knowledge contributed crucially to the shaping of modernity, soon would become indispensable, not only in imperial administrations.

Several aspects of this process deserve attention. First, I direct the scope of my study toward the term “transimperialism,” and I avoid the use of the term “transnational” outside a nationalized context. By using this term, I embrace what has recently been argued by Bernhard Schär, who contends that imperial rule in the nineteenth century created social spaces between European empires, spaces which existed inside and outside Europe, extending across national and imperial borders.12 Transimperial networks allowed for the mobility of members of certain social classes, yet, essentially, they also provided for the circulation of (scientific) knowledge. I relate the study of such networks to the processes of state building by showing how they contributed to the shaping of a new political and administrative arena in Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, an arena which continued to exist well after 1848.13

Second, I scrutinize how new manners of the production and distribution of knowledge and novel concepts of how (scientific) knowledge could be used allowed for the social and political participation and rise of a large group of (relative) newcomers.14 The bourgeois experts that made up a considerable part of European state bureaucracies by the middle of the nineteenth century in many cases represent this type of the homo novus; yet at the same time, they formed the nucleus of a social middle class in the making, which created a new social space for people coming from below as well as for déclassés from the former gentry and lower aristocracy. The major resource of people joining this milieu was their education, professional training, and development of practical and theoretical knowledge, which was frequently important to state administration.15 Yet the “bourgeois world” shared a common set of ideas, values, and ambitious goals across many (though certainly not all) social delimitations and imperial and state borders.16 I argue that not only the bourgeoisie but the entire middle class in the making transcended key processes of state-building in Europe and successfully affected the renegotiation of political participation among established and new stakeholders in the middle of the nineteenth century.

And third, I analyze how connections across empires and a new class of imperial bureaucrats worked to build the modern state and how they made the modern state work for them. How was the unprecedented shift in political representation and participation which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, when rulers had to accept parliaments and constitutional rights, related to this?17 Clearly, this shift has to be interpreted in the wider context of a long-term historical process, which started in the late eighteenth century and transformed the entire knowledge base, upon which states operated. During this process, civil servants, members of the lower aristocracy, military land surveyors, bourgeois intellectuals, and skilled workers all over Europe exchanged theoretical and practical knowledge in many different fields, including cartography, statistics, and economy, and acquired a deeper understanding of the fundamental and general problems modern statehood had to tackle.18

This article reconstructs the lives, achievements, failures, and encounters of two representatives of this loose group of essentially middle-class bureaucrats: Karl Freiherr Czoernig-Czernhausen (1804–89) and Carl Alexander Freiherr von Hügel (1795–1870). Both men originated from middle-class backgrounds and spent at least parts of their respective professional careers in the civil (and in the case of Hügel also in the military) service. Both men contributed considerably to creating the scientific discourse of their time in more than one field. And both, Czoernig and Hügel, were known as “literates” as well: they wrote and published books addressing a wider audience. Finally, both men were politically active and well established in the leading class of the Habsburg Empire.

Czoernig was 44 years old in 1848, Hügel was in his early fifties, either 52 or 53 years old, his precise date of birth cannot be determined. In 1848 Czoernig served in the Frankfurt Parliament, while Hügel was helping Metternich to escape from Vienna and to flee to England.19 Neither man has yet received an extensive biography.20 Yet there is a considerable literature on both of them: Czoernig’s life as a top-ranking civil servant in the pre-March era and during neo-absolutism has particularly attracted the attention of historians interested in Central European statistics in the 1840s and 1850s. Hügel’s life has gained the interest of historians of science as a traveler and collector. Other aspects in the lives of these two men have attracted less interest: Hügel’s career as an officer in the service of the Austrian army as well as his activities in the diplomatic service go unnoticed by most historical research. The same applies to Czoernig, whose work as a politician and author has been overshadowed by the role he played in statistics. Only his work as a linguist earned some attention.21

I argue that it requires a broader and more balanced approach towards the lives and activities of persons such as Czoernig and Hügel to better assess and analyze their work and impact in the context of the first half of the nineteenth century. By reading these two figures primarily as scientists and somehow secondarily as civil servant and officer respectively traveler, the more global dimension of their activities is inevitably missed. It can be observed quite frequently that early nineteenth-century characters with a similarly rich portfolio of professional and non-professional activities are categorized and, therefore, analyzed and interpreted exclusively in the context of one category. Yet, it appears quite striking that many public characters of this generation engaged in a surprisingly broad range of activities, which makes it extremely difficult to place them in a single ‘professional’ denomination.22 There were authors working in the civil service, military officers publishing maps in their spare time, and traveling scientists, who later ended up in the diplomatic field.23 Such ‘careers’ were the norm rather than an exception, which prompts the question why this was so. Clearly, the normative categories and logics of the later nineteenth century, when (professional) fields such as politics, civil service, literature and science were more clearly delimited do not fit well for the analysis and description of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Taking this into consideration, I suggest opening up the analytical framework used to describe and analyze bourgeois agency in Central Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Taking the lives of Karl Czoernig and Carl Alexander von Hügel as illustrative examples, I identify the connections between the different fields of activity in which they engaged in order to come to a broader assessment of the significance of these connections. I start with the observation that the boundaries between different fields in the production and use of knowledge (science, literature, politics, military) were relatively permeable and these fields were overlapping in the period before 1848, which made it possible for agents such as Czoernig and Hügel to move between different arenas and build connections and networks in a Latourian sense. This appears to be a key characteristic of this epoch, yet its consequences have not been given adequate attention in recent scholarship.24

When Czoernig was nominated to serve as head of administrative statistics in the Department of Administrative Statistics (Direktion der administrativen Statistik) in 1841, for example, the procedure was not overtly formalized, and Czoernig’s formal qualifications were not discussed.25 Czoernig was already a well-known and respected authority in terms of the production, administration and distribution of state and public knowledge, yet he was not an academic statistician in the pure sense of the word. On the other hand, at the time, the sphere of work of the position to which he was appointed was not very clearly defined if judged by later standards. 43 years later, on the other hand, when Theodor Inama-Sternegg took charge of more or less the same office, it was of utmost importance that he primarily fulfill the formal scientific qualifications for the job.26 In his case, Inama-Sternegg was a trained statistician, at least to the extent to which one could study statistics in the 1870s and 1880s, but, more importantly, his work was recognized and appreciated by an international yet at the same time still transimperial scientific community of statisticians. Inama-Sternegg’s predecessor, however, had been an experienced and trustworthy high-ranking civil servant, who had served in this position for little more than two years. Before him, Adolf Ficker, a student and protégé of Czoernig’s who had even fewer formal qualifications than Czoernig himself, had been in charge of the office.

The point is that both Czoernig and Ficker could oversee a critical office in charge of state statistics for extended periods of time. Both were experienced men and had enjoyed generalist’s educations: They had undergone a complete course of universalist secondary school education and had also been trained in legal studies. As late as the 1870s, jurists and historians socialized in state administration could well lead statistical offices, even those of the Habsburg Empire, which at the time were among such leading institutions worldwide. Both Czoernig and Ficker played important roles in the most important international board of scientific statistics at the time, the International Statistical Congress. Not only were they renowned and respected experts, they exercised considerable agency and power in the definition and execution of statistical standards. Yet, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that both Czoernig and Ficker followed broad agendas, which went far beyond statistics. Czoernig found the time to write the two most important books on the condition and development of the Habsburg state in the 1850s and Ficker devoted substantial efforts and energy to the development of census statistics that would exclude any reference to language or ethnic belonging.

In the 1870s, this began to change as professional and academic training in statistics became an increasingly compulsory prerequisite for work in the field. Whereas Czoernig and later to a lesser extent Ficker enjoyed the liberty of occupying themselves with a large number of different fields of interest, this became less and less possible in the 1870s. Scientific gatekeepers were put in place to assure that states’ statistical knowledge met certain requirements of objectivity.27 States which failed to comply with this standard risked losing recognition as “modern” states.28

Thus, the nomination of Theodor Inama-Sternegg marked the end of an era in the production of state knowledge. He took office as a statistical scientist, his only secondary occupation being his activity as a university teacher at the department of statistics at the University of Vienna. Inama-Sternegg kept his distance from the state, despite being a high ranking civil servant. He put science first, and his understanding of his role and profession might well be considered symptomatic for a process of crystallization (or in the terminology of Max Weber, professionalization) which had begun in the 1840s and came to an end in the 1880s, when clear borders between different fields of knowledge-related activities (politics, science, literature, civil service) were established. Men like Czoernig and von Hügel not only could and did switch among fields which were far from being clearly delimitated in the era between 1830 and 1860, they were also able to make strategic use of their mobility and agility to act competently in different yet in most cases adjacent or associated fields. Unlike Inama-Sternegg, they did not need to keep ostentatious distance from the state, which gave them authority. Only decades later, in the 1880s, did proximity to the state pose a potential threat to a scientist’s reputation as independent and objective.

Czoernig and von Hügel not only moved between different fields of knowledge and knowledge production. They also circulated among different regional and imperial affiliations. Both men seized opportunities to engage on different levels of the state (in the case of von Hügel, also in different imperial spheres) and oscillate around the states’ inner domains at changing distances. As will be shown, Czoernig proved a highly capable administrator on the provincial level in Lombardy and Trieste as well as on the Central State level in Vienna. Hügel meanwhile proved an officer of great value between Scandinavia and Sicily, and he later continued his career with the Habsburg Empire as an ambassador in Florence and Brussels, after having traveled to South Asia and Oceania, under the protection and to the profit of the British Empire.

Karl Freiherr Czoernig-Czernhausen

Czoernig was born into a bourgeois family in Tschernhausen (today Černousy in the Czech Republic) in northwestern Bohemia in 1804, the son of an administrator of an estate of the family Clam-Gallas.29 His mother was the daughter of a textile manufacturer. After completing grammar school, Czoernig studied law (to be more precise law, governance, and public policy, or Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften) at the universities of Prague and Vienna. Central European scholarship and examination regulations in the early nineteenth century considered law a very broad matter and therefore obliged students to study a comprehensive curriculum, which included many aspects of contemporary political economy and political science.30 Czoernig was an excellent student, with a keen interest in all sorts of statistics, statistical reasoning, and representation of data. Supposedly, while he was still a student at law school, his academic teacher Joseph Ritter von Kudler considered him a “future Dupin of Austria.”31

Having completed his studies, Czoernig joined the civil service in Trieste in 1828. While pursuing his professional career, he started publishing what was then categorized as literature in the widest sense of the word. His Topographisch-historisch-statistische Beschreibung von Reichenberg. Nebst einem Anhange: Die Beschreibung von Gablonz enthaltend successfully combined different forms of knowledge. Czoernig delved into topography, moved on to history, added an extensive chapter on trade and the professions, and finished with “the circumstances and the movement of the population” of the Bohemian town of Reichenberg/Liberec, which was near where he was born and raised. The study was comprehensive, comprising more than 200 pages, yet it was just the first in a long line of similar publications to come. It appeared in 1829. Two years later, in 1831, Czoernig moved from Trieste to Milan, where he integrated well into the intellectual life of the Lombardian capital and soon became the secretary of Governor Count Hartig.32

Czoernig spent almost ten years in Milan, not only as a relatively high-ranking member of the administration, but also as a very productive author, scholar, topographer, and statistician. In sheer numbers, his output was impressive; it included further works on the topography and trade of parts of northern Italy, including again statistical inquiries, but also travelogues and analyses of political events. Czoernig’s work was based to a high degree on original data which he himself had gathered, and it reflects in parts an enormous degree of independent research.33 His social fabric included politicians, scholars, and members of the Lombardian bourgeoisie. Czoernig mastered Italian to a remarkable degree, and the extent to which he was able to integrate into the contemporary intellectual life of Milan has lately been assessed as extremely high.34

In 1841, Czoernig moved to Vienna, where he became head of the Department of Administrative Statistics, then a part of the Court of Auditors (k.k. General Rechnungs-Directorium). At age 36, he had collected a number of distinctions and memberships. He had become a 2nd class Knight of the Ducal Order of St. Louis of Lucca, an Honorary Member of the Milan Brera Academy and the Athenians of Bergamo and Brescia, but also of the Austrian Lloyd, which at the time was a relatively young shipping company (founded only in 1833), but which would soon become a global player. He was a corresponding member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, the Patriotic Economic Society of Bohemia, and the Imperial and Royal Moravian-Silesian Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Nature, and Regional Studies. He was also a full member of the Patriotic Association for the Encouragement of Industriousness in Bohemia and the Lower Austrian Trade Association.35 This list might be considered proof of Czoernig’s sociality, yet at the same time it demonstrates the extent of his range of different activities and interests and the social, political, economic, scientific, and artistic network, stretched from northern Italy across the Lower Austrian heartlands of the Habsburg Empire to Bohemia, Silesia, and Moravia.

As an administrative statistician, Czoernig started from the beginning. His academic training did not particularly qualify him for the job, yet he had an advantage over better-qualified academics, who might have represented competition for him.36 Czoernig had practical experience and had shown a considerable degree of creativity when it comes to using numbers and numerical descriptions of the social world. He developed a close relationship with his superior Karl Friedrich Kübeck Freiherr von Kübau, which turned out to be useful in the years to come, as Kübeck was able to increase Czoernig’s scope of action. Over the course of the 1840s, Czoernig was busy with the re-dimensioning and reorganization of the Department of Administrative Statistics, which grew considerably in the years leading up to 1848. After 1843, for a time he wrote less, but Czoernig explored new fields of activity and further expanded his network. He became involved with the Capitalien- und Rentenversicherungsanstalt (capital and pension insurance institution), the Vienna-Gloggnitz-Railway, and in particular the administration of the Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft (Danube Steamship Company), which had begun to flourish at the time.37 He also started to climb the ranks of state administration, and by 1846 he had been promoted Hofrath.

In 1848, his Bohemian electoral district nominated him to serve as its representative in the Frankfurt Parliament, although he had not applied for the position. In Frankfurt, he took a moderate conservative stance when he joined the Café Milani fraction. His fellow parliamentarians mandated him to voice their position in a memorandum, which he did before withdrawing from the Parliament and returning to Vienna, where new tasks awaited him. In the course of the reorganization of the state administration in the wake of 1848, his entire department became part of the newly founded Ministerium für Handel, Gewerbe und öffentliche Bauten (Ministry of Trade, Commerce, and Public Buildings). Moving the Department of Administrative Statistics from the Court of Auditors into a Ministry brought Czoernig much closer to the central domains of the modern state. He was promoted to Sections-Chef (head of a department) and thus became a high-ranking civil servant, and he soon had to assume further duties in the ministry. In 1850, he was sent to Trieste, where he worked until 1852 on the construction of a new institution, the Central-Seebehörde (Central Sea Authority). He was also in charge of the Zolldepartment (Customs Department) and the Bauarchiv (building archive). The latter function included responsibility for the further development of the railway and canal network, but also for historical monuments.

Little is known at the moment about how Czoernig managed to deal with the sheer number of duties he had to fulfill, although his overall performance seems to have been more than satisfactory. Waltraud Heindl’s work Gehorsame Rebellen offers some information that is helpful here. She shows convincingly that civil servants in the Habsburg Empire toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth were hardly overworked. It is remarkable that the situation in the protestant lands of Central Germany seems to have been quite the contrary at the time.38 Even if one assumes that the situation of civil servants working for the Zentralstellen had not deteriorated significantly by the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Czoernig clearly must have had outstanding organizational skills and must have been quite effective in managing the tasks that he had assumed. In addition to the broad range of activities and duties that he had to deal with in the early 1850s, he was still in charge of the Department of Administrative Statistics. Its composition and the way in which it functioned provide some insight into how Czoernig actually worked. He had been successful in establishing and enlarging the department, which had been founded in 1829 with only a handful of clerks borrowed from the Court of Auditors.39

By the early 1850s, Czoernig had at least two well-qualified and trustworthy men in his department who could take charge of larger tasks and act on their own initiative: Adolph Ficker and Gustav Adolph Schimmer. In 1855, Czoernig published his Ethnographie der österreichischen Monarchie (Ethnography of the Austrian Monarchy) in three volumes, a project he had been working on for fourteen years. The most interesting part of the publication consisted of a comprehensive map featuring the results of what at the time was the most detailed and thorough investigation into the languages spoken in the monarchy. Czoernig had not only collaborated closely with the Militärgeographisches Institut (Department of Military Cartography), which by that time was performing the enormous land survey which had been begun by Emperor Francis II/I almost half a century earlier in 1806,40 he had also made vast use of other resources of the military and the administration by querying civil servants and sending officers out on field research missions. It is thus difficult to draw a dividing line between the realms of the private and the professional in the activities in which Czoernig indulged or involved himself, so difficult, indeed, that these two categories perhaps cannot be applied meaningfully in his case. There are a few similar examples, which highlight the degree to which private resources and state resources were put to use in pursuit of a single goal, for instance the Scheda-Karte (Scheda-map).41 Modern statehood in the making provided an enormous testing ground, and the relationship between this new notion of a state under construction and its bourgeois (civil as well as military) servants had to be defined in an uncountable series of steps and encounters.

The character of Czoernig’s Ethnographie reflected the conditions under which it had been produced. Officially a grand piece of private scholarship, it could not have been written without the support provided by the state, as the gathering of the data it presented reflected an enormous effort on the part of the administration’s and the military’s personnel, achieved most likely not only during the service hours of those involved. The result of this effort was a three-volume magisterial work featuring something between private scholarship, science in the widest sense of the word, and official information and data on Imperial Austria.42 A little later, Czoernig published another piece, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung 1848–1858, in which he used statistics that he had not included in his Ethnographie and defined the Habsburg Empire once more as a state, which was inevitably multinational due to its position at a point where three large peoples met, its topography (which matched the different peoples’ respective characters each in particularly favorable ways), and the degree of profit these three tribes (Volksstämme) gained from each other.43 Not only did Czoernig employ a narrative that interwove the long-term historical development of each of the three tribes he had identified as primordial, he also constructed a massive and integrative narration of 1850s Imperial Austria that legitimized Habsburg rule and central administration on two levels. It was cast as natural insofar as topography was involved, and from the perspective of the social moment, Habsburg rule was characterized as harmonious, since the state in its condition at the time represented the fruit of a long, shared history.

Czoernig’s literary work of the 1850s, which combined rulers’ interests with private scholarship and could, at least in parts, stake claim to scientific objectivity by contemporary standards, offers an outstanding example of how the Bürgertum (bourgeoisie) got involved with the state-building project in the 1850s. Men of Czoernig’s class invested substantial efforts and resources into the modern state in the making, though this could mean significant risk. (I will come back to the strategies that were employed to avert risk a little bit later.)

In the mid-1850s, Czoernig reached the peak of his career. At the head of the statistical department of the states’ central administration, he successfully participated in launching a series of International Statistical Congresses, which allowed for the exchange of statistical data and standards among different countries.44 The first congress took place in Brussels in 1853, the second in Paris in 1855, and in 1857, Vienna became the stage of the international gathering of the most important statisticians of the time.45 The Habsburg Empire’s administrative statistics appear to have been at the top in the 1850s. Yet it is quite likely that statistics were not the focus of Czoernig’s attention at the time.46 His position and responsibilities in the Ministry had a far larger scope, though Czoernig seems to have considered the Department of Administrative Statistics a “center of calculation,” which he used as a resource in order to collect and administrate data and build structured knowledge on the different domains with which he was dealing (infrastructure and buildings, but also financial matters).47 In the first half of the 1850s, Czoernig’s role in the making of the modern state was quite impressive. He was in charge of the setup of a railway system and the drafting of a legal framework for the latter, and as noted before, between 1850 and 1852, he worked in Trieste, where he oversaw the development of the Central-Seebehörde. He was also responsible for practically everything that had to do with the material cultural heritage of the Monarchy and its public building infrastructure.48 His duties went beyond the borders of the Kaiserstaat (Imperial Austria), as he had to take over diplomatic missions as well, for instance financial matters which took him to Amsterdam, Paris, and London in 1854.49

As mentioned earlier, Czoernig blended into the Lombardian bourgeoisie of the 1830s smoothly. He seems to have been no less at ease in the milieus of diplomacy and an emerging international scientific scene. A classically educated polyglot, Czoernig shared a broad background of knowledge and common references with other members of a transimperial bourgeois class, which had grown considerably in the first half of the nineteenth century. Men like the Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet and the Prussian historian and statistician Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert had much more in common with people outside their respective state’s borders than they did with any other large group in their own societies. Between 1830 and 1850, members of this class had become more important for modernizing states, and rulers had become increasingly dependent on these creators and administrators of the knowledge central to the conduct of the state. By the early 1850s, men like Czoernig brokered their respective rulers’ interests among themselves, which appears to have opened new room for maneuver for bourgeois civil servants.50

By the late 1850s, Czoernig’s light began to fade, though most probably not because of any mistakes he had made. In 1859, the Ministry of Trade, Commerce, and Public Buildings was disbanded, and as a consequence Czoernig lost most of his responsibilities, except for the Department of Administrative Statistics, which was again attached to the Court of Auditors, which meant this time that statistics was put at a greater distance from the state’s central authorities. To a certain extent, it was cut off from a lot of the information it had processed in the 1850s. Czoernig managed to set up a new board, the k.k. statistische Central-Commission (Imperial and Royal Central Statistical Committee) in 1863, yet his retirement in 1865 raised suspicions that his withdrawal had to do less with his weakened health (this was his claim) and more to do with disappointment concerning his new and reduced role in the civil service.51 He had been one of the faces of “neoabsolutist” rule,52 and in the years leading up to the Compromise of 1867, the bureaucracy developed a tendency to purge itself of high-profiled protagonists of the rigid era of the 1850s, which grew more and more unpopular.53

Czoernig retired to Gorizia, where he spent the remaining 24 years of his life. He intensified his research into the history, linguistics, and archeology of the region, and he began to pursue his literary ambitions again. When Czoernig died in 1889, he left behind an impressively diverse and rich oeuvre, covering roughly half a dozen of what had by the late 1880s become clearly defined scientific disciplines, a number of works which at the time would have been classified belles lettres or literature, and the fruits of a long and successful career in the civil service of the Habsburg Empire. To a certain extent, Czoernig had been made to pay for his strong exposure during the neoabsolutist 1850s, yet when he died at the age of 85, his contemporaries had difficulty fitting the complexity, richness, and diversity of his career into a single narrative. Czoernig was among the last of his kind. Even Ficker, little more than ten years his junior, enjoyed significantly fewer liberties in his career. The bourgeois class of the 1880s was more structured. Its members had clear professional careers, and they recognized the clear boundaries between one’s occupation and one’s private life.

Carl Alexander Anselm Freiherr von Hügel

Whereas Czoernig’s life has been analyzed from different perspectives, things are very different with von Hügel. There is much less literature on the latter. Born either in 1795 or 1796 in Regensburg, he was the son of a diplomat who had entered the service of the Habsburg emperor in January 1794.54 There, Johann Aloys Joseph von Hügel rose quickly and soon became a plenipotentiary. His son, Carl, enjoyed private tutoring and a Catholic education, before he went to law school in Heidelberg in 1810 or 1811. Two years later, he joined the Hussars of the Austrian Army as an officer and fought in the Napoleonic Wars for two years.55 By the invasion of Paris, Carl von Hügel had reached the rank of a captain. He then took part in the Northern Mission and was sent to Sweden. Hügel seized the opportunity and traveled through Scandinavia and Russia between 1817 and 1818. Supposedly in 1819, he joined the 5th Hussar Regiment, which was then in southern Italy, yet he was stationed in Provence and served as Commandant de place in Arles and Tarascon. In 1821, he participated in the expedition to Naples, which secured King Ferdinand his throne, and he then stayed on in Naples as a Military Attaché of the Habsburg Empire from 1821 to 1824, when he returned to Vienna and quit his position with the army.

Not yet 30 years old, Hügel had spent almost fifteen years abroad, traveling in Europe and Russia. The existing information on him is often ambiguous and unclear. His precise year of birth cannot be determined from the information available in the secondary literature, and further data is either incomplete or inconsistent. His father, Johann Aloys Joseph von Hügel, died in 1825. As the younger son, Carl Alexander, seems to have had some financial resources. After finishing his career with the army, he bought a house in Hietzing, a suburb of Vienna at the time in the vicinity of Schönbrunn Castle. He had gardens planted and a park built around his house, which soon became well known. Over the course of the following years, Hügel began to prepare his most famous journey to southeast Asia and Oceania.56 A horticulturalist of a certain reputation, he was able to expand his knowledge in his field of interest over the years between 1825 and 1830. Yet there seems to have been another aspect to his journey which had to do with his private life. He was engaged to Countess Mélanie Zichy Ferraris, who finally chose Prince Clemens Wenzel von Metternich over him, whom she married in 1831.57

Hügel had left the country in 1830, when he departed for England and then continued on to France. He left Toulon in May 1831 aboard the French naval ship D’Assas. Via Greece and Crete, he traveled to Alexandria, where he arrived in June. Hügel visited Cyprus and then Syria, from where he went to Antioch, Homs, and Palmyra. Finally, he moved on to Baalbek and then to Mount Lebanon, where he contracted cholera. His servant died of the disease, but Hügel recovered and traveled to Bombay via Suez and Aden. He arrived there in 1832. He then went south, after having fallen falling ill again, to Deccan, where he saw Goa and Mysore. Via the Malabar Coast he moved on to Ceylon, where he spent another four months. He then went up the southwest coast of India to Pondicherry and Madras. In autumn 1833, he boarded the English ship Alligator, and traveled to the Indian Archipelago and then to Australia. He then returned to India via New Zealand, Manila, Macao, and Canton, arriving in Calcutta. This was the starting point for what is probably the best-known part of his journey. He took off for the Himalaya Mountains, went on to Cashmere, and headed towards Delhi in 1835 via the land of the Sikhs before he arrived in Bombay again. There he spent another year, and then he went back to England via the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Helena. In the course of the six years of his journey, Hügel had accumulated an immense collection of objects, plants, butterflies, further objects of interest to natural history, and diverse artifacts of ethnographic value, a total of over 30,000 pieces, which he then brought back to Vienna.

Many details of this journey merit discussion in greater detail. With regards to the sources on his trip and on his experiences, one can use his four-volume description of the last part of his journey from Calcutta via the Himalayas, Cashmere, and the Punjab to Delhi and Bombay. A second, smaller book project has dealt with his experiences in the Pacific. In India, Hügel was accompanied for most of his trip by a British delegation, but the “government” did not allow anyone to cross the Sutlej river. Thus, the East India Company granted foreign travelers, to whom these regulations did not apply, considerable support.58 In addition to Hügel, this applied to a number of European travelers, among them the French Victor Jacquemont. Hügel traveled in comfort. His expedition consisted of more than 100 people, among them 60 bearers, but also 37 servants, as well as hunters, gardeners, and people responsible for catching and preserving butterflies.59 He ordered supplies of food to be taken for him in tinned cans, and most of his provisions were sent from Europe. Hügel himself went on horseback, lest the terrain not allow twelve bearers to carry him. He had close contacts in and excellent ties to the colonial administration, and he could make good use of them. Hügel not only collected objects, he also gathered and processed information. He drew maps, and he helped the British acquire certain bits of knowledge they could not get themselves. Thus, he participated in the British colonial project, a good example of transimperial bonding, as described by Bernhard Schär in his study Tropenliebe. He also had support from the British with logistics. Without the infrastructure of the colonial administration and the military and naval presence of the British Empire, it would have been much more difficult for Hügel to make his journey.

Hügel returned to Vienna in 1836, and his collection followed a little later. In 1837, Hügel contacted Kaspar von Sternberg, a former minister under Francis and a renowned connoisseur of the Habsburg Empire’s museal scene in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hügel expressed his wish to sell his collection to the Austrian state. His rich collection contained a large number of duplicates, and therefore appears to have been of considerable value to any large contemporary museum. Duplicates offered a good chance to trade objects with other museums. According to Claudia Schweizer, who studied the exchange between Hügel and Sternberg, Hügel was in urgent need of money once he returned from his journey, as he had spent almost all of his resources. According to the letters, his journey cost him roughly 130,000 fl.60 (I will return to the question of financing bourgeois lifestyles again in the conclusion to this essay.) Hügel finally succeeded in selling his collection to the state, and he spent the eleven years between 1836 and 1847 almost entirely in Vienna, where he continued his pursuit of botany and horticulture. He also started work on his four-volume publication on the Cashmere part of his journey, the first volume of which was published in 1840.

Carl von Hügel’s network and connections are more difficult to trace than those of Czoernig, at least before the 1850s, when he took official positions in the Habsburg Empire and his merits and memberships were published in the Schematismus. In the late 1820s, he was only mentioned there as a Knight of the Order of Leopold, a title which he probably inherited from his father. Yet Hügel’s close links to Metternich and the episode with Sternberg surely give reason to assume that his contacts in the so-called First Society were intact.61 Hügel was an important figure in the establishment of the Horticultural Society in Vienna, which not only collected and cultivated plants, but also created a social space in which a large number of prominent figures met and exchanged ideas and specimens.62 He became the president of the k.k. Gartenbau-Gesellschaft, and the proceedings of this society illuminate the social sphere in which he moved. The Horticultural Society included a large number of leading figures from the political and cultural elite of the late 1830s and early 1840s. In 1847, Hügel was appointed ordinary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and he was then soon engaged in Verona to Elizabeth Farquharson, the significantly younger daughter of British General Francis Farquharson.63 Her father had served in the army of the East India Company, and Hügel had known the daughter as a girl. They met again when she accompanied her father on a visit to Hügel’s villa in Vienna.64

Upon the outbreak of the revolution in March, Hügel helped Chancellor Metternich escape from Vienna to Felsberg and, from there, to The Hague and England, where he spent the following winter.65 Back in the Habsburg Empire, he joined the army and was sent to Radetzky’s headquarters in Lombardy. Over the course of the following months, Hügel was first sent to Tuscany, where he participated in the siege of Leghorn, and then to Naples on a diplomatic mission. Later in 1849, Hügel was charged with further diplomatic duties in Florence, where he was consequently appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Grand Ducal Court of Tuscany and where he was to remain for the next few years. In June 1851, he married his fiancée in Florence, and over the course of the next decade they had three children. In 1859, the family returned to Vienna. Hügel was sent to Brussels roughly a year later, in September 1860, where he was to take up the same position he had held in Tuscany in the Belgian Court. He resumed his studies and his scientific work both in Tuscany and in Belgium, and he published several works in these two places. In 1867, he retired to England, where he lived in Torquay until May 1870, when he left England in order to return to the Habsburg Empire. However, he did not make it back. He died in Brussels on the 2nd of June 1870.

Conclusion

The two men discussed in this article, Karl Freiherr von Czoernig and Carl Alexander Freiherr von Hügel, had extraordinary careers in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet neither of these two careers was particularly unusual against the backdrop of the era. As men of bourgeois backgrounds, they were able not only to consolidate their respective social position, but also to advance in the ranks of a society that was undergoing a significant phase of reconstruction. Their lives reflect the processes of empire-building and state-building which were taking place in the first half of the nineteenth century. Albeit Czoernig and Hügel were (and still are) perceived as “Austrian” civil servants, scientists, and travelers, their respective biographies make evident that things were more complicated than this label implies. Not only does one have to bear in mind the question of what “Austrian-ness” meant in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Kaiserthum Oesterreich (Austrian Empire) had just replaced the Habsburg part of the Holy Roman Empire, but several other questions arise. The similarities between the two men’s lives provide an illustrative outline of what the Habsburg Empire’s bourgeois classes66 looked like in the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century, at least in what was later to become Cisleithania: Catholics, socialized in the language and German “culture,” with a standardized grammar school and in some cases university education. The distinction between lower aristocracy and bourgeoisie appears to have been less important than the distinction between lower nobility and aristocracy. At least for Czoernig and Hügel, employment in the imperial service does not seem to have been vital. Both seem to have had other financial resources. The situation was quite different for many other social climbers, mainly of lower middle-class backgrounds, who relied mostly on their education as a resource. Given their milieu, which was not petit bourgeois, Czoernig and Hügel were not exceptional. Franz Adlgasser raises the question of the material situation of men of these classes in his opening essay to the edition of the diaries of Franz Freiherr von Andrian-Werburg.67 Andrian-Werburg’s repeated complaints concerning his financial situation notwithstanding, as Adlgasser points out, he enjoyed a large degree of liberty and never actually had had to work. Andrian-Werburg’s precarious independence appears to be something that applied to many members of this class. Although there is yet not enough evidence to form a final opinion on the material circumstances of Czoernig and Hügel, many hints suggest that both men enjoyed a considerable degree of personal liberty. They seem to have been well-funded, and Hügel at least was not dependent on his professional career for money. He had remarkable financial resources of his own, and this allowed him to travel the world for almost six years.68 Moreover, the 1830s and 1840s presented themselves to men like Andrian-Werburg, Czoernig, and Hügel as an age of opportunity. The long list of possible occupations, accessible in theory to Andrian-Werburg (as noted by Adlgasser), gives an idea of the expansion of bourgeois professional horizons in these two decades, given that a certain social capital was on hand.69

Sources on the activities of associations and societies, which were beginning their activities from the 1830s onwards, illustrate how old and new elites mingled in the rule and administration of the Habsburg Empire. Journals depicting the accomplishments of organizations such as the k.k. Gartenbau-Gesellschaft, the kaiserlich-königliche Geographische Gesellschaft, and the Alpenverein shed light on the formation and spread of a new social rhizome, which became the backbone of modern state-formation after 1848. A closer look at these societies and associations not only reveals a new social fabric in the making, it also focuses attention on the role science played in the process, and it gives a sense of the versatility of the protagonists involved. Over the course of the 1830s, it is difficult to link Czoernig to a single professional career. Was he a civil servant, a man of letters, a scientist, or a statistician? Perhaps even a politician? Czoernig was all of this, yet it is likely that he himself never asked the question in the 1830s, as the different occupations could well exist alongside one another. There was no particular need to narrow things down. The situation is a tad less clear with Hügel, yet essentially the circumstances were similar. As a traveler, he did not focus on a single field of knowledge or interest. He collected objects of interest to botanists, ethnologists, historians, orientalists, and geographers. According to Joseph Vogl, literature and science, which were seen as integral parts of a comprehensive understanding of knowledge, only began to part ways after 1800, and this sheds some light on the development one observes in the two courses of life under scrutiny here.70

Science, in addition to being a profession, was the central element of the European bourgeois project of the nineteenth century. At least in the case of Central Europe, some decisive aspects can be identified here. Its promise of truth and its relevance to the vital projects of modernization (land survey, administration, infrastructure, and welfare) fostered hopes in Czoernig, who believed in the public good, and Hügel, who appears to have been more interested in a universal order of things.

And yet another aspect that deserves attention is the notion of “loyalty.” Hügel is a particularly interesting case here. The long-serving officer in the imperial service of Francis II/I gathered highly valued military intelligence for the East India Company, and he returned into the imperial service of Francis Joseph a mere fifteen years later. It appears to be quite evident that Hügel’s sense of obligation towards the emperor had little to do with more recent ideas of the obligation of a citizen of a nation-state to his “nation.” Like the Sarasin cousins in Bernhard C. Schär’s Tropenliebe, Hügel contributed actively yet indirectly to the further expansion of the British Empire by producing and delivering fundamental knowledge on the geographical and political conditions in the Sikh’s territories in the 1830s.71 Neither Czoernig’s nor Hügel’s life can be sufficiently understood against the backdrop of a modern-state-based or nation-state-based narrative. Their bourgeois lives were closely entangled with the emergence of modern statehood in the Habsburg Empire, yet they also tried to keep a certain distance from the state. Moreover, they do appear to have been prepared for alternative scenarios, which would have suited them less. Hügel, for instance, who spent a total of far more than two decades abroad, could easily have arranged for a life outside the Habsburg Empire. Czoernig left the imperial civil service at 61 and retreated to Görz/Gorizia, on the imperial periphery, where he spent another 20 years. Czoernig and Hügel must both be considered politically active men, with certain agendas on their respective minds, representing certain class interests, particularly the strengthening of political representation. Hügel was pushing his agenda less vigorously than Czoernig, who appears to have become a very prominent figure in early neo-absolutism. Wolfram Siemann provided a brilliant analysis of the long-term strategic thinking of early Modern aristocratic families which contained a number of elements that resemble the scripts put to use by Czoernig and Hügel, including strategic networking, distributing risks, and avoiding dependencies.72

The 1830s and 1840s provided ample opportunities to bourgeois social climbers, and Czoernig and Hügel were able to seize them. Both attained a high degree of geographic mobility, soon became members of a transimperial bourgeois class, and quickly climbed the career ladders in the imperial military and civil service. Yet both men had interests beyond their professional obligations, and they pursued them with an intensity that might appear unusually high, only by contemporary standards, but even by the standards of the later nineteenth century. They contributed to the emergence of the modern state in Central Europe on several levels, for instance as people who performed imperial services (of not only one empire), but also as writers, scientists (in the contemporary sense of the word), and diplomats. Acting cautiously, both men proved capable of taking action on the political stage as well, if necessary. They appear thus as two archetypal members of a very specific and quickly growing social strata in nineteenth-century European history, the heterogenic middling classes. Yet the examples of Czoernig and Hügel show that it is time to broaden our analytical framework when it comes to analyses of the activities and the range of options these people had and put to use in what has frequently been called the birth of the modern state.

 

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* I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, whose detailed and learned feedback helped in many ways to reshape and improve this article. Furthermore, Pieter Judson, who read and revised later versions of the text, was a great help, and his input made a significant contribution to the sharpening of the central argument. And finally, Debbie Coen allowed me to read parts of the manuscript of her next book and to cite from it.

The Rothschild Consortium and the State Debt
of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

György Kövér
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
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The state debts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after 1867 consisted of three parts: loans acquired before 1867; loans acquired by the Cisleithanian half of the empire after the Compromise of 1867; and, finally, new state debt generated by the Kingdom of Hungary also after 1867. Between 1873 and 1910, with some exceptions, it was the Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Disconto-Gesellschaft consortium that acted in the role of the state banker in both halves of the dualistic state. The decision in favor of the Rothschilds was based not only on their extensive international network, rapid communications, immense prestige, an enormous amount of capital and a high degree of competitiveness but on the fact that they had long been heavily involved in Austrian financial affairs and in their quasi-monopoly position were able to assess relatively favorable costs. While the international market treated Hungary’s state bonds as the public debt of a sovereign state, it still considered Austria and Hungary to be economically interdependent parts of the same, albeit politically dual, monarchy even as the threat of the dualist state’s dissolution emerged more and more frequently from the turn of the century onwards. After initial hardships, yields on Hungary’s state debt with some lag were able to keep up with the profitability on the again gradually increasing Austrian state debt.

Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, State debt, Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Disconto-Gesellschaft consortium, reputation, “empire effect”, “Rothschild effect”

 Empires have written themselves back into history. Such a statement can now be confidently made not only because of the post-colonial turn in writing history or the empire-building aspirations that we currently witness, but also because of the ongoing large-scale reevaluation of the history of past empires. In historiography, the Eastern European empires of the nineteenth century are no longer seen as entities predestined to dissolve, even though this is what was taught to several generations of students after World War I.1 The view that there is, in fact, no diametrical opposition between the ability of the empires to renew themselves and the nation-building processes that emerge within the framework of those empires seems to be gaining an impressive foothold.2 Even those scholars who study the Ottoman Empire, a textbook example of slow, drawn-out erosion, now emphasize the modern nature and the effectiveness of its sweeping imperial reforms.

However, the study of the “empire effect” has generated serious controversy with regard to the five decades leading up to World War I.3 In fact, economists and economic historians analyzing more or less similar data series have arrived at widely diverging conclusions. Of course, there have been differences both in terms of the size of the databases and the econometric methods applied, yet it is difficult to accept that scholars should arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions in evaluating the impact of any given country’s status as a colony in terms of its access to international money markets—in other words, in resolving the issue of whether colonies (without making a distinction between the colonies of white settlers and other types of colonies) were offered more favorable terms than sovereign states when acquiring loans in the London money-market.4 When examining the issue not so much from the perspective of the colonies, but from that of the various sovereign states entering the money markets on very different terms, yet another question arises: did investors in actual fact apply the same criteria in assessing colonies and sovereign states? For in the case of colonies, empirical guarantees proved to be a much more important factor than any financial parameter.5

The shift we see in the historical evaluation of the Habsburg Danubian empire is quite spectacular even though various scholars may not offer converging interpretations or may not necessarily, or fully, consider the quantitative results available in the context of these newly arising questions.6 What’s more, similar inquiries into the key parameters of Austrian and Hungarian government finance have shown that those parameters hardly exerted any “consistent and robust impact on the yields of state bonds.”7

 

* * *

 

From the perspective of the empire, the state debts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after 1867 consisted of three distinct parts: loans acquired before 1867; loans acquired by the Cisleithanian half of the empire after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867; and, finally, new state debt generated by the Kingdom of Hungary also after 1867. The first of these might, in effect, be called the “common debt” of the Monarchy—then again, this terminology would certainly contradict the official Hungarian position, which claimed that, in the context of public law, such debts were generated without Hungarian consent, therefore Hungary could not be held accountable for their repayment. However, as reflected in the wording of Hungary’s acts on the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Hungarian party, “out of fairness and political considerations,” was willing to contribute to the repayment of such debt to an agreed extent, in fact applying the so-called principle of praecipuum in the actual calculations. In other words, the Hungarian government agreed to make partial interest payments with respect to a principal amount that it never acknowledged as its own debt. Then again, this was not the only public-law absurdity in the Dual Monarchy.

Let us set the Hungarian public-law position aside for the time being and consider the following graph, which plots the Dual Monarchy’s state debt:

Graph 1. Austro-Hungarian State Debt (1867–1913)

Source: Clemens Jobst and Thomas Scheiber, “Austria-Hungary from 1863 to 1914,” in South-Eastern European Monetary and Economic Statistics from the Nineteenth Century to World War II (South-Eastern European Monetary History Network) (Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Vienna: Bank of Greece, Bulgarian National Bank, National Bank of Romania, Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 2014), 97.

As a result of the reduction of the interest rate and the introduction of the coupon tax in 1868, the pre-1867, so-called “common debt” temporarily decreased. During the period leading up to the war of 1877–78, the “common debt” exceptionally increased once again, more or less reaching earlier levels. However, from this period on, the “common debt” remained practically unchanged, although it would be more accurate to say that it showed a slightly decreasing trend. After the Compromise of 1867, the two state parties—the two halves of the empire, Cisleithania (Austria) and Transleithania (Hungary)—had access to government loans as separate sovereign states. As a result of the situation that emerged after 1868, the Cisleithanian part of the empire had no access to new loans (the London Stock Exchange barred the trading of Austrian loans, and trading in Hungarian state debt had only been possible at a premium payable on top of the Austrian debts to begin with).8 This means that Hungary, entering first to the London Stock Exchange in 1872, had not only to overcome the difficulties of a newcomer, but also to cover the costs of the Austrian coupon tax on foreign bonds.9 The correspondence of the Austrian Minister-President Friedrich Beust and the head of the Paris House of Rothschild banking family, James de Rothschild, precisely reflects the basic structure of the debtor-versus-borrower game situation.10 James de Rothschild expressed his firm critical opinion; however finally—in contrast to the London Stock Exchange—the Paris Bourse did not exclude the Austrian bonds from the quotation list. At the same time the question increased the tensions among the branches of the Rothschild family, especially between Vienna and Paris.11

It is a fact that with the exception of the years immediately leading up to World War I, the state debt of the Austrian Hereditary Lands significantly lagged behind the indebtedness levels of the Kingdom of Hungary. Enjoying limited sovereignty, the Hungarian state made every effort after 1867 to make up for what it had missed out on due to having lost its own war of independence: during the period between 1849 and the Compromise of 1867, Hungary had not been in a position to issue its own sovereign debt. Plotting the rate of Hungarian sovereign debt accumulation in this first stage generates an unusually steep curve practically until the early 1890s, the second half of the 1880s being the only interim period showing some degree of self-restraint. Then, for about two decades around the turn of the century, Hungarian sovereign debt barely increased at all, or only at a very modest rate. In turn, the half decade leading up to World War I brought rapid sovereign debt accumulation both in Cisleithania and in Transleithania, although by this period the Austrian Hereditary Lands were by far in the lead.

Reviewing Austria’s and Hungary’s state debt curves in parallel, it is not a challenge to notice how the two move in close coordination. From the beginning of the 1870s and into the middle of the 1880s, the dynamic of Hungarian sovereign debt accumulation was, as it were, balanced out—one might be tempted to say, supported from the background—by Austria’s own self-restraint and stability. Then in the second half of the 1880s, the slowing rate of Hungarian sovereign debt accumulation was offset by the increasing rate of Austrian sovereign debt accumulation. At the turn of the decade, the dynamics changed again: while Austria’s accumulation of sovereign debt lost its momentum, this was compensated for by the dizzying rate at which Hungary’s own sovereign debt started to increase. Then, from the period following the currency reform, Cisleithania’s sovereign debt accumulation took center stage once again. Of course, one could interpret this contrapuntal game of sovereign debt accumulation rates as a manifestation of the harmonious cooperation between the two state parties involved, although with some understanding of the nature of the relations between Austria and Hungary at the turn of the century, this would be hardly credible. Not discarding this option entirely, the linkage between sovereign debt accumulation dynamics of the two states may well be rooted somewhere else. In observing the turnover of the securities (mostly through focusing on the interests paid), we have seen the two states as the main—almost only—protagonists. However, there was yet another main protagonist in the context of the debts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, namely, the Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Dictonto-Gesellschaft consortium, the gateway through which the state bonds of the Dual Monarchy gained access to the global international money market. Between 1873 and 1910, with some exceptions, it was this consortium that acted in the role of the state banker in both halves of the dualistic state: it offered short-term bridge loans as well as what were called long-term consolidated government loans. It is therefore a good idea to take a brief look at the behavior of the issuing consortium in relation to the Austrian and Hungarian bonds.

Published sources in financial statistics allow us to rely on fairly accurate data as to where Hungarian state bonds were placed throughout the years.12 The available data is based on the annual interest payments made by Hungary’s Ministry of Finance. Despite the fact that coupons paid in Vienna or Paris do not necessarily belong to Austrian or French investors, this is the data series that literature has tacitly used to illustrate the countries from which the foreign capital financing Hungary’s state debt originated. In fact, it does largely reflect the main trends, but it may be wise to consider that the data series reflects not so much states as, rather, currency zones. Whether the coupons were paid in Paris, Berlin or London was more a function of the agio or disagio of the franc, the mark, or the pound sterling against the Austrian currency (especially before 1892, the year in which the empire adopted the Austro-Hungarian krone as its official currency).

Graph 2. The Territorial Distribution of Holders of Hungarian State Securities as Reflected in the Place of Coupon Payment (1868–1914)

Sources: Fellner, Die Zahlungsbilanz Ungarns, Statement III; Fellner, “Das Volkseinkommen Österreich und Ungarn,” Table VII.

The graph clearly indicates how in the initial stage, during the 1870s, the Viennese money market played a relatively modest role in financing the Hungarian state debt. The proportion of Austrian bond holders started to increase from the 1880s and peaked during the first half of the 1890s; during this same period, the proportion of Hungarian investors stagnated and even decreased. The turn of the century ushered in a new era when investors from abroad (i.e., from outside the Dual Monarchy) and the Hungarian capital market jointly absorbed the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian state debt.

The Monarchy’s state bond market consciously took advantage of the fragmentation of the international capital market. It issued state bonds denominated either in gold or in gold currencies specifically for the international money markets, while its securities denominated in the Austrian bank currency were issued mostly for resident investors. It is possible to track the journey of the various securities one by one from their placement all the way to their payment, but this would go far beyond the limitations of this article. For this very reason, we will now focus primarily on trends in the issue and interest payment of the so-called Austrian and Hungarian four-percent gold rentes and the Austrian and Hungarian five-percent paper rentes especially with regard to the period when the monarchy implemented its currency reform and launched its rente conversion program.

Both the Austrian and Hungarian four-percent gold rentes were denominated in gold forints; accordingly, they were linked to the money markets of the gold currency countries through the gold forint exchange rate (the official exchange rates being 100 gold forints = 250 francs = 200 marks = 10 pounds sterling). Bond issues were strictly tailored to the needs and possibilities of the international capital market. The Austrian Hereditary Lands issued such denominations from 1876, with Hungary following suit in 1880. Already in 1876, partly because of the earlier unification and interest rate reduction, the Cisleithanian lands could reenter the international capital market offering four-percent rentes; in turn, Hungary’s financial situation at the time only allowed the issue of six-percent gold rentes, and it was only at the beginning of the 1880s that Hungary, too, could switch to four-percent gold rentes.

From 1876 until the end of the 1880s, Austria acquired loans in the amount of 340,850,000 gold forints by issuing gold rentes; during the decade of the 1880s, Hungary’s total sovereign debt denominated in this type of security amounted to 592,000,000 gold forints. During the 1880s, both state parties also issued five-percent paper rentes to cover their capital requirements, primarily targeting domestic investors looking for opportunities to place their savings. During the 1880s, the Austrian state issued five-percent paper rentes in a total nominal value of 238,877,100 forints, while the Hungarian state’s bond issues amounted to a total nominal value of 358,487,000 forints.13 As can be seen from these figures, the Hungarian party’s capital needs were significantly higher in the case of both types of rente bonds. In the case of paper rente, at the time of the first issue, both governments made attempts to contract other consortia (in Vienna, Julian Dunajewski contacted the Länderbank group, while in Pest Gyula Szapáry entered negotiations with a consortium led by the Union-bank of Vienna), but eventually both found their way back to the consortium belonging to the Rothschilds, whom they inevitably needed anyway when it came to the issuance of gold rentes. This clearly shows how closely interrelated the various rentes were, not only in terms of the issuing government (Austria or Hungary), but also in terms of their denomination (gold forints versus paper forints).

Already during the second half of the 1870s, Austrian four-percent gold rente prices and Hungarian six-percent gold rente prices were closely interrelated. In a letter written to the management of Creditanstalt and discussing, among other things, the issue of the second tranche, Adolph von Hansemann, general manager of Berlin-based Disconto-Gesellschaft, went as far as making the following—quite straightforward—statement: “as soon as the Austrian gold rente appreciates to 61 percent [. . .] time will have come to issue the Hungarian gold rente.”14

From the time of its very birth, the Hungarian four-percent gold rente was in the limelight of both the domestic and international press. A wide range of factors were put forward in an effort to explain the success of the May 1881 issue of the rente, the improvement in Hungary’s finances being evidently one of the more reasonable explanations. At the same time, many were quick to comment that while the finances of Hungary were in fact improving, its deficit levels remained unchanged, “without much of a guarantee for the country’s political future.” The fact of the matter is that subscribers “put their confidence in the Messrs. Rothschild rather than in Hungary, and, generally speaking have no intention to hold what may be allotted them, but hope to sell at a premium.”15 Even those voicing their indignation or bewilderment about this state of the affairs had to come to grips with the fact that Austrian and Hungarian securities were valued differently, even though the difference in their valuation decreased somewhat over time.16 Even in the very last stage of converting six-percent rentes into four-percent rentes, press commentaries always tried to offer some sort of a rational explanation with respect to the price-level differences between Austrian and Hungarian securities, even though they could only guess the probability of any given future development.17

 

	Average Price		Profitability*
	4% Austrian	4% Hungarian	4% Austrian	4% Hungarian
1876	**70.80		6.79
1877	73.90		6.62
1878	72.93		6.43
1879	78.64		5.91
1880	87.59		5.33
1881	93.40	90.74	5.00	5.10
1882	94.41	87.29	5.03	5.40
1883	98.69	87.94	4.82	5.40
1884	102.66	92.20	4.71	5.20
1885	108.27	97.90	4.56	5.00
1886	115.60	104.57	4.32	4.70
1887	111.44	100.04	4.49	5.00
1888	110.18	99.43	4.46	4.90
1889	109.98	101.45	4.31	4.60
1890	108.50	102.43	4.25	4.50
1891	109.93	104.46	4.22	4.40
1892	113.28		4.19
* Profits calculated according to the annual average of the gold agio.
** First issued on December 22, 1876.

 

Table 1. A. The Annual Average Price and Profitability of Austrian and Hungarian Gold Rentes

 

	Average Price		Profitability (Yields)
	5% Austrian	5% Hungarian	5% Austrian	5% Hungarian
1881	95.48	88.35	5.24	5.6
1882	91.48	86.28	5.46	5.7
1883	93.20	86.59	5.36	5.7
1884	95.81	88.76	5.22	5.6
1885	98.98	91.03	5.05	5.4
1886	101.52	94.45	4.92	5.2
1887	96.26	87.83	5.19	5.7
1888	95.54	88.04	5.23	5.6
1889	99.99	95.79	5.00	5.2
1890	101.63	99.55	4.92	5.02
1891	102.09	101.22	4.90	4.93
1892*	101.14		4.94

 

Table 1. B. The Annual Average Price and Profitability of Austrian and Hungarian Paper Rentes

* After the decision concerning bond conversion(s).

Sources: Statistische Tabellen zur Währungs-Frage der Österreich-Ungarischen Monarchie, 306; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik (Vienna, 1893), 253; A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok, 115.

Economic history literature has also dedicated a lot of attention to the question of the price difference between Austrian and Hungarian state securities (and the moderation of such difference around the time of the currency reform) through the work of authors such as John Komlos, Marc Flandreau, and, most recently, Michael Pammer.18 The quantitative analysis carried out has helped discard many factors that had been given serious consideration earlier, when the discourse on these issues had been still mostly based on guesswork. However, some archival sources, such as, first and foremost, the correspondence between the banking and finance houses of the Rothschilds still offer further opportunities. In addition to highlighting the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between the Rothschild consortium and the Austrian and Hungarian governments, they also reflect the conflict and rivalry characterizing the internal life of the consortium. As a typical episode manifesting such rivalry, we might mention the apprehensions of the Rothschilds of Vienna about how the Berlin banks and especially A. Hansemann, general manager of Disconto-Gesellschaft, aspired to gain a leading role in the transactions; they were of the opinion that in issues of currency regulation and gold procurement, London and Vienna should be granted exclusive leadership. At the same time, they had no doubts about the fact that, when it comes to loan negotiations, the finance ministers of Austria and Hungary would favor the Rothschild consortium over any other financial group.19 In a much broader sense than it was originally used by Flandreau and Flores we could speak about a “Rothschild effect.”20

Throughout the period, the primary target of Austrian gold rente issues was increasingly Germany (by 1898, Germany’s total share reached 60 percent). The French money market played a significant role initially, but its share gradually dwindled away, with German investors moving in to take over;21 Belgium and Switzerland, in turn, never held significant amounts. In the meantime, the proportion of Austrian bondholders increased from one-fifth to one-fourth. During the 1890s, Austrian capital carved out a dynamically increasing share for itself among Hungarian four-percent gold rente holders; here, it was the Austrians who took over the role of the quickly retreating French bondholders. It may be worth mentioning that there was no change in the proportion of Hungarian gold rentes held by Germans, British, or Hungarians during the period. Consequently, taking a look at changes in the placement of Austrian and Hungarian four-percent gold rentes in parallel, we can conclude that while French bond holders pulled out of the bond markets of both governments, those who entered these markets in their place were primarily German investors in the case of Austria and Austrian investors in the case of Hungary. In other words, the increase in the share of Austrian investors in Hungary was mostly made possible by the placement of Austrian securities in Germany (the crowding-out effect).

A look at where Hungarian five-percent paper rente coupon payments were made around the turn of the 1880s and 1890s also offers interesting lessons. It may be worth adding that in the case of this type of security, the Hungarian finance minister placed special emphasis on making sure that the largest possible portion of the securities were held by Hungarian investors. Not even the banks’ archives allow us to reconstruct the sale of paper rentes in a fully detailed fashion, but it seems to be beyond any doubt that sales in Hungary showed a declining trend. In 1882, as much as 45 percent to 47 percent of the securities were sold in Hungary; by 1887, the rate dropped to less than 30 percent, with sales in Austria ramping up to over 60 percent.22 All this occurred despite the fact that the Hungarian member of the consortium, the General Credit Bank of Hungary, increased its own share from ten percent in 1882 to eleven percent in 1887. When negotiations started about the 14th issue in 1887, and the minutes of Credit Bank’s board of directors meeting recorded the fixed-price takeover of a package of five-percent paper rentes in a total nominal value of 23,000,000 forints, the following comment was made nearly routinely: “Our participation is eleven percent, although we transfer two percent of the entire transaction to financial institutions with whom we are closely affiliated.”23 On the day of closing the transaction, the head of the Vienna Rothschilds sent off first a telegram and then a detailed letter to his cousins in Paris informing them about the terms of the deal: a package of Hungarian paper rentes in a total nominal value of 23 million forints was to be taken over at a fixed price of 85¾ (the quoted daily price being 88¾). He did not believe that a public subscription would be necessary; however, the bonds became available over the counter (Schalterwege) in Vienna, Pest, and Berlin the very same day. Negotiations with the Austrian finance minister also started the very same week.24 The option for the next tranche arising from the contracts was formulated by Creditanstalt’s board of directors in even greater unison under the brief title Consortien für Oesterreichische und Ungarische Papierrente.25

However, financial statistics on coupon payment suggest that Hungary held on to its share of 44 percent to 46 percent in 1886 as well as in 1890, and that, in fact, the proportion of Hungarian investors increased to 63 percent by 1892 (while the proportion of Austrian investors dropped to less than one-third just before the conversion of the paper rentes). The scarce statistical data we have on the coupon payment of Austrian paper rentes seems to indicate that all payments were made in Austria, even though this is somewhat difficult to believe in the light of the aforesaid. What may have happened at most is that certain old views lingered on within the system of financial statistics, treating the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as a unified entity in this respect.26

As far as the Austrian gold rente strategy of the Vienna Rothschilds is concerned, the stock book itemizes, at best, certain occasional purchase or sale transactions related to high or increasing price levels or designed to influence price levels on an ad hoc basis. In the long run, they expected Hungarian gold rente prices to increase. They gradually increased their stock in this type of bond as prices rose, and when price levels peaked, they sold off an overwhelming part of the stock of bonds they had held. Also noteworthy is to what extent their expectations depended on international arbitrage; this link is clearly demonstrated not only by the fact that they kept bonds on deposit with Bleichröder but also by their speculation on the Berlin parity.

In terms of strategy, the strongest similarities are seen between Hungarian gold rentes and Hungarian paper rentes, even though in the case of the latter, expectations focused not on selling the paper rentes, but specifically on their conversion into krone rentes. However, the price difference between Austrian and Hungarian state bond issues never entirely disappeared even after transition to the krone.27

It seems especially worthy of our attention that the prices of the Austrian and Hungarian state bond issues remained interlinked even after the Rothschild consortium lost its monopolistic position in Cisleithania as far as Austrian state bonds were concerned.28 One way to interpret this is that the influence that the Rothschild consortium retained on Hungarian state bonds even after Albert’s death provided additional safeguards against any major diversion from the internationally accepted terms. It would therefore appear that while the international market treated Hungary’s state bonds as the public debt of a sovereign state29 (there seems to exist no other worthwhile explanation as to why the price difference, moderating at times but always reappearing, persisted), it still considered Austria and Hungary to be economically interdependent parts of the same, albeit politically dual, monarchy even as the threat of the dualist state’s dissolution emerged more and more frequently from the turn of the century onwards. The influence wielded by the Rothschild consortium certainly played a supporting role in ensuring that neither of the constituent states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy went bankrupt.

 

* * *

 

Customarily, there are a number of relative indicators in use to measure the rate of the sovereign debt of Austria and Hungary: the sovereign debt expressed in absolute terms is taken in relation to the size of the population (public debt per capita) or to the rate of GDP growth (on the basis of Max Schulze’s data),30 while Marc Flandreau analyzed interest burden data in the light of government revenues.31

This latter method of calculation has its own difficulties. For one, in order to establish the actual amount of interests paid, the contribution paid by both Austria and Hungary towards their “common debt” must also be considered. It must also be mentioned that Austria and Hungary followed very different practical standards when recording the revenues and expenditures of state companies for the purposes of public finance accounting.32

 

Graph 5 a-b. Austrian and Hungarian Debt Service and Government Revenues (1875–1912)
in Millions of Forints

Source: Flandreau, “The Logic of Compromise,” 31.

 

In the Austrian Hereditary Lands—which bore the brunt of paying back the “common state debt”—the debt-service ratio fluctuated by around one-fourth during the 1870s and all the way through the 1890s. It was only successfully decreased to a level lower than one-fifth around the turn of the century. By 1912, right before World War I, it was under 15 percent. Referencing Graph 1 once again, this was obviously only possible due to the fact that government revenues increased much more dynamically than the country’s debt service, and as Table 3 allows us to conclude, there was no deterioration in the terms of issue of state bonds. During the 1870s and the 1880s, Hungary’s debt-service ratio hovered around one-third, and it was only pushed under the critical threshold of 30 percent around 1890. However, the debt burden slowly but surely grew in both halves of the empire. In Hungary, annual government revenue levels varied wildly around the turn of the century, primarily because of poor crops and years of economic crisis. Consequently, the relative burden of the country’s debt service was never lower than one-fifth until after 1906, although by 1912—just as in Austria—it was lower than the 15-percent threshold. Thus, during the 1890s—after an ominous start, in the wake of its currency reform and debt conversions—the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy finally broke out of the zone (a debt service ratio of over 25 percent) that was typical of heavily indebted states.33 And this is where the Rothschild consortium’s role in debt consolidation merits more of our attention among other factors pertaining to the international money market.

The credit that a state can obtain on the international money market depends on several factors. Recent economic, economic-history and even international political-science analyses have placed particular significance on the role that the reputation of an indebted country plays in determining its creditworthiness. The reputation of a country is based not only on its past, that is, whether it has previously taken out loans, whether it has repaid loans promptly or has perhaps become insolvent (or asked for rescheduling of its debt), but on the estimation of whether under exceptional circumstances (natural catastrophe, war, economic crisis, etc.) it will prove capable and inclined to maintain its solvency. It is important to be familiar with the motives of the creditors (bankers and investors) in each given situation: the information they possess when evaluating requests for credit; the network of connections and amount of capital that capital-market players have at their disposal, the degree to which they are committed to participating in the transaction (are they trying to cut their losses as the result of endangered previous engagements, are they going after their money?). The standing of an indebted country in the international money-market hierarchy determines its position—its degree of access to the primary market centers (which in the nineteenth century were London and Paris).

The Austrian Empire had the reputation as a bad debtor already before the Compromise of 1867. The decision of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1868 to unify and convert the banknotes in which its debt was denominated and to introduce a coupon tax in the interest of stabilizing its state finances served to further impair this reputation. The aforesaid measures cast a shadow upon Hungary as well just as the country was entering the international market. The semi-sovereign Hungarian state claimed in vain that the so-called “old debts” had been accrued without its consent and that it thus had no debts of its own, since potential creditors did not have a positive historical judgement of its behavior as a debtor and it even seemed to be conceivable that the state could declare insolvency at any time. Indeed, the Transleithanian half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy began to accumulate sovereign debt so rapidly that it was nearly forced into sovereign default in 1873. The commitment of Hungary to the Rothschild–Creditanstalt–Disconto-Gesellschaft consortium played a decisive role in averting such default. The decision in favor of the Rothschilds was based not only on their extensive international network, rapid communications, immense prestige, enormous amount of capital and high degree of competitiveness, but on the fact that they had long been heavily involved in Austrian financial affairs and in their quasi–monopoly position were able to assess relatively favorable costs.34 Cisleithania, however, was forced under its post-1868 financial circumstances to refrain from rapidly accruing debt and, in fact, assumed the role of creditor within the internal market of the Dual Monarchy. However, the influence of the Rothschilds was not unlimited: for example, they attempted for almost a half century to rescue Spain from insolvency, though when the country’s debt was nevertheless rescheduled in the 1870s, they withdrew from the Spanish government-bond market and sought—and found—compensation in various enterprises (railway and mining).35 By contrast, after initial hardships, yields on Hungary’s state debt with some lag were able to keep up with the profitability on the again gradually increasing Austrian state debt. Hungary’s state debt did not follow the typical path of newcomers.36 It was able to forge benefit from its initial handicap via the integration of the Dual Monarchy’s money markets, particularly after the adoption of the Limping Gold Standard in 1892. The Hungarian money-market—through its close connection with the Wiener Börse and the Austo-Hungarian Bank—was able to gain admission to the “financial clique” at the forefront of the international network. Without this affiliation, Hungary would have unlikely been able to emerge from its peripheral position.37

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Austria

Hungary

Graph 3. Changes in the Territorial Distribution of Austrian and Hungarian Four-Percent Gold Rente Coupon Payments Made in International Money Markets (1886–1898)

Sources: Statistische Tabellen zur Währungs-Frage der Österreich-Ungarischen Monarchie; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 1893; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 2nd edition, 2nd part (Vienna, 1900–1904); A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok, 1891; A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok (1892–1901) (manuscript) (Budapest, Hungarian Royal Finance Ministry, 1904).

Graph 4

The Territorial Distribution of Hungarian Five-Percent Paper Rente Coupon Payments (Austrian Forint Currency, Percent)

Source: A valuta-ügyre vonatkozó statisztikai adatok (Budapest, 1891), 80–86; Tabellen zur Währungs-Statistik, 2nd edition, 2nd part (Vienna, 1900–1904). 466, 484.

	4% Austrian Gold Rente			4% Hungarian Gold Rente				5% Hungarian Paper Rente
	Nominal Value (Thousand ft)	Quoted at (%)	Real Value at Quotation Price (ft)	Nominal Value (ft)	Quoted at (%)	Real value at Quotation Price (ft)	Note	Nominal Value (Thousand ft)	Quoted at	Real Value at Quotation Price (Thousand ft)	Note
Jan 1888				520,000	96	499,200	249,700 forints deposited with Bleichröder	890	80	712
Jan 1889				500,000	95.78	478,895		900	93	837
Jan 1890	5	108	5,400	600,000	100	600,000	Berlin parity	500	97	485
Jan 1891				600,000	102	610,000	deposited with Bleichröder	1,250	100	1,250	guarantee bond: 950,000
Jan 1892				600,000	106	636,000		1,250	100	1,250
Jan 1893				100,000	91.60	91,600		2,060	100.25	2,064
Feb 1893							from conversion 17,900				converted into 4% Hungarian korona rente
Jan 1894	372	118	438,960	117,900	116	136,764	100,000 forints deposited with Bleichröder
Jan 1895				117,900	121	142,459
Jan 1896				117,900	121.50	143,248
Jan 1897				117,900	120.50	142,070
Jan 1898				117,900	119.70	141,126
Jan 1899				117,900	115.30	135,938.70
Jan 1900				50,000	116.60	**116,600	** Korona

 

Table 2. Austrian and Hungarian Bonds in the Stock Books of S. M. Rothschild Vienna

Source: RAL 637 - 1 - 163; 637 - 1 - 7

 

		Austria				Hungary				Note
Year	Month	Type	Amount Issued for Subscribing (K)	Issued at	Effective Annual Interest Rate	Type	Amount Issued for Subscribing (K)	Issued at	Effective Annual Interest Rate
1893	I	4% state bond	519,298,000	93.50	4.28
	I	4% amortizable railway bonds	120,000,000	96.00	4.21
	II	4% gold rente	*60,000,000	98.50	4.06	4% gold rente*	*18,000,000	96.20	4.16	* gold forints
	II					4% Krone rente	1,062,000,000	92.50	4.32
1894	III	4% gold rente	*40,000,000	97.75	4.09
1897	V	3½ % state bond	116,901,000	93.50	3.74
1898	III					3½ % Krone rente	60,000	92.50	3.78
1900	V					4% Krone rente	70,000,000	91.00	4.39
1901	VI	4% Krone rente	125,000,000	95.00	4.21
1902	IV					4% Krone rente	1,087,470,000	96.50	4.14
1910	IV					4% Krone rente	112,550,000	92.50	4.78
1911	I					4% state bond	200,000,000	91.60	4.37
1912	I	4% Krone rente	130,000,000	98.50	4.56
	I	4% Krone rente	200,000,000	90.25	4.43
1913	IV	4½ % amortizable state bond	**122,800,000	93.00	4.90					** marks
1914	II					4½ % amortizable state bond	500,000,000	90.45	5.08

 

Table 3. The Prices and Interest Rates of Austrian and Hungarian Consolidated Government Loans at the Time of Subscribing (1893–1914)

Source: MNL OL Z 51 MÁH 16. cs. 226. t.

Between “Here” and “Over There”: Short-term and Circular Mobility from the Czech Lands to Latin America (1880s–1930s)*

Markéta Křížová
Center for Ibero-American Studies, Charles University, Prague
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The present text deals with the phenomenon of short-term mobility from the Czech Lands to Latin America from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s on the basis of sources such as memoirs, letters, and official reports, oral histories, and family histories. An examination of patterns in short-term labor mobility can offer interesting insights into the mechanisms of communication in the broader Atlantic region in the period in question and also further an understanding of cultural and economic interchange and the perceptions by the migrants themselves of their place in the world, their “home,” and their identities. By transmitting skills, experiences, and cultural knowledge, they assisted in the creation of “transnationalism from below” on both sides of the ocean.

Keywords: short-term mobility, labor mobility, Czech Lands, America, Argentina, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transnationalism from below

Introduction

In 1937, Matěj Poláček, a carpenter from southern Moravia, disembarked in the port of Buenos Aires. This fact in itself would be of little interest. In the previous half century, hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans, men and women, had made the same trip. However, Poláček walked down from the deck of Cap Arcona, a luxury transoceanic ship, after having spent several weeks vacationing in his native village. The company for which he was working, the German corporation Grün & Bilfinger, had given him compensation for the work he had performed in the form of tickets for the vessel which had brought him from Hamburg to Buenos Aires in less than two weeks.1 This seems to be at odds with the standard image of Central European migrant worker, but numerous historical sources prove that since the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of migrants had been crossing the Atlantic back and forth, maybe not in such a high-class fashion as Poláček, but playing their part in a complicated web of economic and social relations which transcended the borders of nation states and continents. They were not opting for permanent resettlement, but worked overseas for some time to acquire capital to use in their home countries or to supplement the family income.

The interest of scholars in the great transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries has resulted in a fair amount of monographs and shorter studies. There are many “bilateral histories of migration,” in the words of Tara Zahra, for instance histories of Poles in Chicago or Czechs in Argentina.2 Historians have paid attention in particular to the reasons for which migrants chose to leave their homelands, the mechanisms of integration into receiving societies, and/or the maintenance of earlier loyalties. Only recently has an interest emerged among scholars in the persisting strong and multilayered ties between the countries of origin and those of destination.3 There were in fact rather high rates of return. About 30 percent of the Europeans who entered through the North American ports between 1815 and 1914 returned to Europe, and the proportion was even higher for Latin America during this period, so the phenomenon of return and circular mobility is indeed worth consideration.4 The movement across the Atlantic certainly left profound marks on the intellectual and material culture of the countries from which the migrants set sail and the societies where they settled, whether permanently or temporarily.

In the discourse of the times and to a great extent also in the historiography, return migration was and is often equated with failure. Certainly, there were those who returned because they were unable to fulfill their visions. Still, the glum picture given by Charles Dickens in his American Notes of those “coming back, even poorer than they went” hardly captures the complexity of the phenomenon of overseas mobility.5 In fact, the preponderant majority of those who headed for America planned to return. In 1900, the Portuguese consul in Buenos Aires wrote, with respect to his fellow countrymen coming to Argentina: “The main aspiration of this people is to save some money to buy small plots of land in their homeland.”6 Furthermore, at the time, thanks to the improvements in maritime and overland travel, workers were able to cross the Atlantic repeatedly. Alongside the colonies of fellow countrymen who were trying to establish themselves in the New World arose communities of those “with their feet in both societies,”7 able to maintain (at least partially) their status in their home society, including kinship ties and political loyalties. After returning, by bringing information and money to their native communities and putting into practice knowledge gained abroad, they drew relations, friends, and countrymen who had remained at home into the Atlantic system of economic and cultural interchange. Thus, they contributed to the creation on both sides of the ocean of what Ewa Morawska has called “transnationalism from below,” in which everyday people participated as the principal agents within the borders of the choices allowed to them by the concrete socio-political circumstances.8 On the other hand, while becoming “transnational,” these men and women were able to define who they were and where they belonged, in spite of competing allegiances for different “homes.”9

The realization that the transatlantic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in fact, all migration has almost never been unidirectional has prompted many historians to use the term “mobility” instead of the concepts of “outmigration” and “immigration, ” which were originally coined to meet the administrative needs of nation states in the nineteenth century.10 I prefer it in this article, as it better captures the multidirectional and interwoven patterns of migration activities, with emphasis on the short term and the repeated and circular moves over the ocean and back. My goal is to demonstrate, via a very limited case study focused on the Czech Lands/Czechoslovakia,11 how this type of study can help us move beyond a narrowly nationalistic approach to the study of history. Also, as historians have shown a considerably stronger interest in migration to the United States than in migration to the southern parts of the American continents, I have focused on mobility to and from Latin America as the principal starting point of my analysis.

While there has been a steady influx of individuals and smaller groups from Central Europe to the southern parts of the American continent since the colonial period which grew stronger throughout the nineteenth century, the main impetus for increased interest in settling in Latin America was the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited opportunities for Czechs, together with other Central and Eastern Europeans, to enter the USA. Also, the adverse consequences of the global economic crisis in the 1930s in Central Europe and the local booms in various parts of Latin America sparked further interest in Latin America (even though, as I will explain, the global crisis caused drops in available workplaces in Latin American countries as well).12 While the permanent migration from the Czech Lands to Latin America has been studied intensively by Czechoslovak/Czech historians since the 1960s,13 the phenomenon of short-term, circular, and return mobility has not yet received similar attention.

Sources

There certainly is an explanation for the relative lack of interest among historians in short-term mobility, namely, the scarcity of sources. In a sense, these migrants fall into a “blind spot” in the archival documentation, as the official statistics usually only include people who sought the approval of the authorities to leave the country permanently. It is not possible to determine the volume of the back and forth movement between America and Europe with any precision. Short-term laborers often relied on the help of family members or friends, especially at the beginning of their ventures, but they were relatively mobile and they remained largely outside the more compact expatriate communities in America, mixing instead with other salaried laborers, either locals or immigrants from other countries. Thus, their names do not appear frequently in the source materials concerning national clubs and associations in the host societies.14 There is, furthermore, a general problem with statistics dealing with migrants from Austro-Hungary. Czechs were often automatically considered either “Austrians” or “Germans,” or they were mixed with other Slavs, like Poles; they sometimes even presented themselves as such when looking for work.15

There are scattered mentions of companies sending their employees overseas in the published and manuscript autobiographies of migrants, the documentation from official visits by Czech and Austro-Hungarian and later Czechoslovak officials touring Latin America for various purposes, and travelogues or newspaper articles, and in the archival fonds. Interviews were done with Czech settlers repatriated from Latin America after 1918, as well as (by mail) with their fellow countrymen who opted to stay abroad, by the employees of Československý ústav zahraniční [Czechoslovak Foreign Institute].16 Finally, there are the family histories, transmitted orally, together with postcards, photographs, and other memorabilia. Several decades ago, Julianna Puskás eloquently demonstrated the value of these types of documents for the study of (not only) Hungarian migrations.17 Many of the testimonies—some of them so far unknown to or little exploited by historians—are only indirect; often there are just scraps and pieces from peoples’ life histories.

Given the nature of these sources, one is compelled to adopt a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach. My interest lies primarily in the agency of migrants themselves, as individuals and members of family units and local communities, who were acting within concrete social, geographical, and temporal spaces. Overseas migration always involved individual decision making, and if we seek to arrive at a nuanced understanding of these historical processes, we must consider individual stories as well as the broader collective phenomena. Still, my ambition has been to arrive, on the basis of these individual stories, at some general conclusions with respect to the transatlantic entanglements, which constituted one of the crucial historical factors in the making of present-day Central Europe.18

The chronological delineation of this study connects two very distinctive political regimes, beginning with the period when the Czech Lands still constituted part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and ending two decades after they had been made part of the new, postwar state of Czechoslovakia. While major political events often make suitable milestones for historical study (and in certain respects the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918 constituted a turning point in the history of migrations, since tens of thousands of Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks returned from over the world to the lands of their birth),19 I still opt for structural approach. Therefore, I examine short-term and circular mobility from its commencement at the very end of the nineteenth century (due to the considerable reduction in the cost of transatlantic passage) up to the beginning of the World War II, when overseas transit in general was brought to an abrupt end.

Back and Forth

The concept of “short-term mobility” escapes precise definition.20 People had a wide array of reasons for leaving for the New World, and a similarly diverse array of experiences once they arrived. For the present analysis, and aware of the insufficiencies of my approach, I take as central the initial aim of returning instead of remaining and becoming permanent residents and, at times, a pattern of repeated visits. The social composition of the group under consideration is also important. I do not take into account the members of the managerial staff of the Austrian/Czech/Czechoslovak companies in the Latin American branches (i.e. what is referred to as “career migration”21), nor do I consider the journalists and travelers who earned their living along the way. Rather, I focus on individuals who came from the same social strata as the long-term and permanent migrants, specifically the lower and middle classes, urban and rural, and in the majority of cases people who did manual labor. For them, living overseas was a means to an end, a labor strategy,22 not the final objective of their endeavors. The intention of returning rules out the poorest, who often had to sell everything they possessed, arriving in the New World “with just the shirt they had on, without a penny in their pocket,” as stated one of the texts from the beginning of the twentieth century the author of which warned Czechs against emigration.23 Surely also those who planned to return sometimes had difficulties raising the necessary cash and were compelled to take out mortgages or ask for loans from their relatives, but were not forced to sell everything (and clearly, the mere act of taking out a mortgage or asking for a loan meant that the person intended to return).24 Also, the poorest migrants usually lacked the necessary qualifications that would enable them to find better-paid jobs and save money for a return ticket.

Of course, sometimes the decision to stay or return was not made by the migrants themselves, but rather was dictated by outside forces. Many of those who originally planned to stay permanently returned within a few years, because the promises made by the agents and the authorities of the host country had given them misleading impressions of the realities of everyday life in the New World. Sometimes people who wished to return were forced to stay when they realized that their savings would barely suffice to buy a return ticket. Judging from the memoirs and interviews, there were many such cases. “I came to Argentina, as many of us did, thinking that I will get rich quickly and easily and I will earn a lot of money and then immediately I will return home. This was my firm conviction when I left home,” stated František Lukešík, who came to Argentina around 1910. As he could not find salaried work, he ended up in the agricultural colony Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, founded in 1913 by several Czech families.25

There was never significant seasonal transatlantic mobility from the Czech Lands, i.e. nothing equivalent to the Spanish and Italian golondrinas (swallows), farmhands who took advantage of the alternating agricultural cycles between the hemispheres and spent the European winter harvesting fruit and wheat in Argentina and then returned to Europe in May.26 Even with the improved system of railroad traffic, the Czech Lands remained too distant from the Mediterranean and Atlantic ports to make such movements worthwhile. Most of the Czechs and Moravians who went to America for shorter stays were industrial rather than agricultural workers, and they came for periods of years instead of several months. Still, there was a correlation between overseas mobility and the existing patterns of seasonal work.

This, in fact, is true for the whole of Europe. While traditionally the various types of migration—transatlantic, continental, or regional—have been studied in virtual isolation, in recent decades various historians have proven their mutual interdependence, and the “push” and “pull” models have given way to more complex explanations.27 As for the Czech Lands, in some parts, such as southwestern Bohemia and southern Moravia, mostly poorer agricultural regions with high number of landless or petty farmers who could not support their families by working the land alone, there existed a long tradition of seasonal and short-term labor mobility within and outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Germany, Serbia, and Italy. Not just young and single, but also married men would spend up to eight months a year seeking skilled or semi-skilled employment as farmhands, bricklayers, brickmakers etc. Women worked as maids in Vienna, but also as construction assistants all over Germany and Austria.28 A special survey of seasonal labor mobility ordered by the Austrian government in 1913 as a supplement to the regular censuses shows clearly the extent of the short-time absences. At the local level, there were places where seasonal workers made up 20 percent or more of the total population, a figure comparable to the percentages in the best-known regions of seasonal out-migration in Europe, like the Italian Friuli.29 Of course, there were also regular or occasional movements from other regions—for example, miners from northern Bohemia drifted to the Ruhr area in times of labor shortage.30

Given the intensity of this mobility, overseas transfer does not appear as exceptional as traditional historical studies have tended to suggest. Rather, it seems to have been one of the alternatives workers could pursue. The fact that communities with existing traditions of seasonal and short-term mobility had already established social mechanisms for accommodating absences and returns is important. There existed what could be termed a “culture of mobility,” i.e. a collective strategy for coping with and taking advantage of the willingness of some of their members to travel by adjusting existing norms, values, and ideologies to their absences.31 Females took male occupations on the farms or hired day laborers to do them; families and the community at large were willing to accept some of the novelties brought about by the return of laborers. The laborers themselves were already used to making accommodations in the new environments in which they had lived, and, last but not least, while working in various European countries, they had opportunities to learn about the possibilities of transoceanic migration.32

It is possible that some of the seasonal workers originally did not plan to go to America, but decided to cross the Atlantic only after coming to the Italian port, for example, and encountering agents of shipping companies.33 Similarly, it is possible that they were approached with offers of work or attracted by rumors while working in Germany, as was the case of Poláček. Up to World War I, in particular Brazil and later Chile actively spread immigration propaganda in Germany, so the Czech seasonal workers who were coming to Germany also became the targets of agents. And even when they did not opt to move overseas themselves, these seasonal workers brought home information about such opportunities from Germany or Italy.34 America certainly was not an unreachable, strange world for Central European farmhands and workers. Of course, mobility, whether short-term or permanent, also depended on concrete economic conditions in a given region. And it should be noted that for the period under consideration overseas short-term mobility remained of secondary importance in comparison with the continuing seasonal labor movements within the Czech Lands or to neighboring countries. The possible paths for improving one’s economic and social status for the inhabitants of the Czech Lands at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries included a number of choices.

A Typology of Short-term Migrants

The countries of destination in Latin America for the short-term migrants were mostly the same as for the long-term and permanent migrants: first and foremost Argentina and Brazil, then to a lesser degree Chile (mostly due to its geographical position, which made short-term stays more difficult) and Mexico, and only exceptionally Central America or other Latin American countries. Argentina and Brazil in particular offered an acceptable climate and a relatively large array of work opportunities due to rapid modernization and urbanization, which had been underway since the second half of the nineteenth century, a factor even more important for short-term migrants than for those who mostly opted for privately owned land and an independent existence.

Regarding the typology of short-term mobility from the Czech Lands, there are two clearly distinguishable groups. The first of these consisted of unskilled or semi-skilled workers motivated by the vague notion of the “American dream,” as it was spread by the agents of the transportation companies and the colonizing societies or by the successes of their predecessors. In their effort to earn money quickly, they were willing to take any work, but they usually proved ill-prepared for the realities of life in the New World.35 From the point of view of cultural exchange, they did not have much to share with the host societies, and though their work as farm hands or factory workers provided them with new experiences, these insights were not of much use in their native communities. Many of such would-be short-term migrants were in the end forced to remain for a longer period of time than they had initially planned or even permanently, since it proved almost impossible to save money for the return journey. Sometimes, they were repatriated at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian or Czechoslovak embassies.36 Repeated warnings from the authorities and already established fellow-countrymen offer clear evidence of their considerable vulnerability to economic oscillations and social pressures; however, their numbers increased nonetheless, especially during the economic crisis of the 1930s, even though labor opportunities in Latin America decreased sharply precisely at that time.37

The second group consisted of skilled workers. Some of them came to America to find employment in their respective fields, either at random or drawing on the previous experiences of relatives or friends. Others were sent by the companies for which they were working in Europe. For both groups, Latin America offered better opportunities than the United States, where the labor marked had been saturated by immigrant and domestic specialists since the second half of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, factories in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile themselves sent agents to Europe to seek specialists in professions in which there was a high demand for the comparatively few skilled laborers;38 furthermore, these countries actively encouraged the establishment of foreign companies. As the Czech Lands had historically produced some specialized jobs, these workers adapted with relative ease not only to their new lives in various European countries, where their expertise was in demand, but also to conditions on the other side of the ocean. There was also the aforementioned traditional seasonal mobility of construction workers from southern Bohemia and southern Moravia. Matěj Poláček, to whose third arrival in Argentina in the span of ten years I alluded in the opening lines of this article, had been working as a migrant laborer since the 1890s, first in Hungary, then in various German cities, and then in the New World. There, he took part in such projects as the construction of the huge Cruz del Eje dam, the railroad bridge at San Lorenzo, and the “Tiro Federal,” that is, shooting grounds for the federal army in the Argentinian capital.39

There were Czech railroad builders, construction workers, and factory workers all over Argentina, as the precipitous expansion of railroads created a need for people with experience in these professions. For example, workers from the Czech factory in Kopřivnice, a famous producer of railroad carriages, were invited to the state-owned factory in Tafi Viejo in 1910. Because there was a scarcity of work in Kopřivnice at the time, the factory management supported their temporary absence and even organized Spanish courses for them. Of about forty workers, some stayed in Argentina, while others returned home before the war.40 For the dangerous work at the oil fields in southern Argentina, experienced miners were recruited by German agents in the Czech mining regions Ostrava/Ostrau and Kladno.41 At the beginning of the 1930s, the Škoda company of Plzeň delivered facilities for the newly built beet sugar refinery plants in the Argentine provinces of Mendoza and San Juan. Since the nineteenth century, the Bohemian Lands had been at the foreground of sugar production in Europe. After a very unsuccessful first season in the Argentinian enterprise, Škoda arranged to send over technicians and “boilers,” along with the machinery.42

The Bohemian Lands were also famous for beer production. Not only were Czech beer, malt, and hop important export articles, but since the end of the nineteenth century brewing machinery had been exported to furnish breweries all over Latin America. Again, specialized workers were sent to start production, some of them repeatedly when new branches of breweries were established or production was expanded. Vojtěch Vaníček, representative of the Economic Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, traveled in South America together with the aforementioned Zdeněk Fafl in 1910 on behalf of the Trade and Commercial Chamber. He found Czech specialists “in almost every brewery we passed through.”43 Similarly, after visiting Argentina and Brazil in 1910 and finding many Czechs in local breweries, Czech economist Leopold Perutz recommended that “our vocational and trade schools teach Spanish and Portuguese.”44 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jan Mikš first passed through various European breweries, concluding with Zagreb in 1910. He then moved to to South America; there was comparatively intense mobility, both permanent and short term, between Croatia and Latin America, especially Chile.45 For two years, Mikš worked in breweries in Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and other cities. In Santiago, he made the acquaintance of Count Kolowrat-Liechtenstein, the Austrian envoy to Chile, who later employed him as a tenant of his own brewery in the town of Rychnov in eastern Bohemia.46 And, finally, there were representatives of specific professions such as musicians who at the time were in great demand in Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires, where they provided not only the dance music and entertainment in restaurants, but also live accompaniment for silent films.47

The preponderant majority of the short-term migrants were male, in contrast to the more balanced mix in the case of long-term migrants. Still, there were also female specialists. Uruguayan and Argentinian upper-class families preferred maids and cooks from Europe over local labor as a sign of high social standing;48 and there has been a tradition of Czech and Moravian maids going to Vienna, so again the move overseas was more of a prolongation of existing mobility patterns than the establishment of entirely new ones. Also, the Argentinian elites employed governesses from Central Europe who were able to speak French for lower wages than “genuine” French gouvernantes.49 There were certain risks, as the mediating agencies sometimes delivered the young women to brothels.50 In response to numerous reports and complaints, as of 1930, women from Czechoslovakia under the age of twenty-five could only travel to Argentina or Brazil if they could presents an affidavit from a family member or employer who pledged to provide “financial support and moral supervision.”51

Experiences Overseas

Specialized workers often came to South America with a contract already in hand. They were thus spared the humiliating stay in the “Immigrants’ hotels” in Buenos Aires or São Paulo, where they could stay for free, but where conditions were crowded and discouraging,52 and the equally discouraging clamor for work, any work at all. Because they possessed skills that were rare in Latin America, they were able to negotiate their pay and sometimes even the luxury of an occasional trip home. They often felt superior and sometimes voiced a sense of superiority over local laborers, and sometimes even seem to have had a notion of themselves as representatives of a “civilizing mission” who were spreading European/Czech skills in undeveloped regions. The authorities in the home country were actually aware of this and commented on it negatively. While the Habsburg state did not intervene actively in the “export” of skilled workers, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Trade and Industry made efforts (although mostly in vain) to keep specialists in prominent export industries (such as beer-making, sugar-making, glass-making, the textile industry, etc.) within the state borders even in times of rising unemployment during the great crisis of the 1930s precisely because they feared that the transfer of technological knowledge abroad would create competition for domestic production.53

Still, even the position of a highly qualified worker was not at all secure, and America was far from a “new home.” Often, salaries were lower than had been promised.54 Many of the workplaces were far from inviting. For example, in the oil fields in southern Argentina, the workforce consisted mostly of foreigners, the atmosphere was highly cosmopolitan,55 and earnings were relatively high. But, according to the memoirs of some of the Czech workers, the housing conditions were dismal, consisting mostly of crude shacks made of boards and corrugated sheets; there was acute lack of drinking water, which was sold at high prices. Medical facilities were inadequate and there was no compensation for work-related accidents. As the region was isolated, the workers lacked protection and could hardly flee.56

The situation on railroads was similar. When in 1929 the Argentinian government started the construction of the railroad from Salta to Formosa, it negotiated the involvement of a Hungarian company which recruited skilled workers in various places, including the Czech Lands. But as soon became evident, high earnings notwithstanding, the working conditions were hard. Because of the lack of proper machinery, the laborers had to do backbreaking manual work, drinking water was scarce and housing inadequate. In response to reports on these conditions, the Hungarian government forbade further recruitment of workers for Argentina, but the Czechoslovak authorities only issued warnings through the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute.57 Of course, these experiences, if narrated back home, might have had discouraging effects. The dominant image of Latin America as a region in which work was reduced to manual labor is interesting. “In Argentina, intelligence will not find work, as there are enough educated people. Argentina needs only laborers in agriculture and in trade.”58

Those who had worked first in Western Europe, had been members of labor unions and had taken advantage of (or taken part in ensuring) social securities and labor legislature resented the lack of protections for workers in Latin America. The situation was particularly bad in Brazil. “There are no legal protections for workers. The laborers are blatantly oppressed. […] Every factory has its own warehouse with food for workers. Often the laborer does not get any money at all. If he needs medicine or other necessities, he must buy at a high price from the warehouse of the factory and sell at a loss for cash.”59 Of course, this was even more stressful for short-term migrants, who had hoped to accumulate meaningful savings as quickly as possible. For some of the migrants, the stay overseas seems to have been crucial as an experience which increased their awareness of social issues.60 Last but not least, migrants had to face anti-immigrant sentiments, which with the passage of time became more intense in many Latin American countries.

Migrants who aspired to remain in their new homes for longer period of time or even permanently mostly tried to settle down as quickly as possible on purchased or rented estates. The relative availability of land in Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it was becoming scarce in the USA, was one of the major attractions for Czechs (who, unlike other migrants from eastern and southern Europe, generally aspired to settle in the countryside instead of looking for work in urban areas). The temporary migrants, in contrast, often moved around, either because they were sent to new locations by the companies for which they were working or because, in their search for work, they had gotten to know various parts of the country and fellow workers of various nationalities. As they opted for a short, profitable stay in America, with as few expenses as possible, and as they often worked in multilingual and multinational environments, many of them considered it impractical to devote time and money to activities like learning Spanish or Portuguese, especially when they were working for French or German companies.

The dominance of German companies in Argentine industry eased the process of adaptation for Czechs and Moravians, most of whom had at least a superficial knowledge of German. When Karel Urban, one of the would-be sojourners who decided to stay in America, responded to the questionnaire of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute, he commented: “I only remembered several words in Portuguese, but that bit of my German helped me everywhere.”61 The language barrier was another factor which prevented the short-term migrants from constructing the notion of a home (albeit temporary) in America. Of course, without the knowledge of the local language, they were also more vulnerable to being cheated by employers or members of the local population.

The American Trunk

While it was demonstrated above that intercontinental mobility in many respects was followed by long-established models of labor sojourns, this did not just mean a widening of the radius of travel for work. Stays overseas had some important repercussions for the migrants themselves, their families, and the local communities. Of utmost importance were the remittances that flowed into the villages and suburbs in the Czech Lands. The fact that “temporary immigrant comes to earn money and then leaves with wages, [which] is important for doing the work, but is not something [the host country] needs for its development” was noted by the contemporary Czech commentators62 and officials in Latin America. Many of the contemporary commentators noted the substantial difference in wages between Argentina, for example, and Europe, not forgetting, however, immediately to note also the high living costs, especially the prices of basic foodstuffs.63 As remittances came mostly through the mail or by personal delivery, it is difficult even to estimate the total sums involved. But they probably meant a boost to local economies through the purchase of land plots and houses64 and also due to the fact that the prolonged absences of numerous males made it necessary to employ hired hands.

The notion of “American wealth” even entered local folklore. One Moravian offered the following characterization of the advantages of migrant labor in the New World for people in the Old: “Good for women in the old country, who have their husbands in America. They work, they send money home.”65 And they also sent exotic goods. Poláček once dispatched a chest of oranges from Argentina shortly before Easter, and his daughters gave them away instead of painted eggs, which is the local custom on Easter Monday.66 This story could be seen merely as a curiosity, but it illustrates the fact that such gifts sent or brought home reinforced the exotic image of the New World in Central Europe and could be also regarded as a symbol of the progressive interlinking of local and regional economies to the transatlantic system.

The returning migrants also brought back information about the world on the far side of the ocean. In his monograph, Mark Wyman uses of the metaphor of the “America trunk” as an apt symbol for both emigration and remigration, of coming to America and returning to the homeland, of conserving the memories of the mother country and bringing home new wares, goods and ideas.67 Certainly, the letters from relatives and friends living in America represented an important source of information for their home communities and, later, for historians.68 But first-hand experiences transmitted by word-of-mouth, together with the presents and memorabilia taken out of the trunk, probably had an even stronger impact, though not one that would leave much trace in historical records. But perhaps these presents and memorabilia influenced the contents of the “American trunk” packed by the next generation of migrants. The seasoned “Mexican” or “American” in fancy clothes, able to deal with any situation and endeavoring to climb the social ladder, even entered the local folklore, including songs, jokes, and fairytales, as well as the popular literature all over the Czech Lands.69

In his memoirs, František Vyšata, a traveler and ardent proponent of the Czech national spirit among migrants, lamented that “the preparation of our fellow countrymen for such a vital step as leaving of motherland was minimal or nonexistent.” Migrants simply bought their tickets from “eloquent agents” and then “off they went to try their luck.”70 But, as was already noted, this was in fact not true. More often than not, prospective migrants had abundant and surprisingly precise information which helped them make carefully considered decisions when contemplating travel overseas. It certainly was not a coincidence that the Czech and Moravian regions in which we find highest number of seasonal migrants to European countries and, later, to America—southwestern Bohemia, southern Moravia—were also regions from which numerous individuals and families decided to move overseas permanently. In a study of contemporary transmigrants, Peggy Lewitt refers to this flow of information as “social remittances” in an effort to accentuate its importance for the increase in the material wellbeing of the home communities because it stimulated other forms of mobility.71 The two types of mobility certainly reinforced each other, as the return migrants spread knowledge, direct or indirect, of the opportunities overseas, while the permanent settlements of fellow countrymen made the shorter stays of those who did not want to remain for good easier. Also, within the framework of short-term mobility, the chain pattern acquired great importance. Memoirs and correspondence confirm that on returning for another stay in America, workers often took with them relatives—brothers, bothers-in-law, nephews etc. —to follow them to the Americas.72

Alongside the economic implications, there were important social and cultural consequences for community cohesion and the lives of the members of communities from which migrants departed for the New World. The overseas sojourns differed from previous patterns of seasonal mobility, if only due to the longer duration of labor stays. Short-term migrants did not dispose of their properties, and for the most part, if married, left their wives behind, thus maintaining also their social position in the community and preventing themselves from establishing closer social ties in the host societies. Though the wives took over the everyday tasks, their husbands managed their affairs from long-distance through correspondence and messages sent back and forth with traveling friends and relatives. Still, the outcomes of their prolonged absences could be damaging. Both contemporary commentators and recent studies have spoken of the “feminization” of society, as wives and other family members were forced to take over some of the work and, perhaps more importantly, the social responsibilities (and thus to some extent the social influence) of the departed men.73 Folklore captured the feelings of uneasiness and a sense of fragmentation, tension, and inconsolable emptiness: “Children are crying aloud when they bid farewell to their father over the wide sea.”74 The documentation of the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute covers many cases of fathers gone overseas and mothers who died or were seriously ill, leaving the care of the offspring to relatives or the state.75 Therefore, since the 1930s, anyone applying for a passport and leaving minor children behind had to demonstrate that he or she had provided for their support.76

Conclusion

The impact of returnees on their home surroundings depended, of course, on many factors, including the length of their stay in the Americas and the extent and type of contacts they had had with American society. However, some general trends emerge. In her comments on the impacts of the return of migrant workers from the United States on the Hungarian countryside, Puskás notes the crucial impact of experiences with the democratic establishment, political freedoms, which made it more difficult for the returnees to tolerate the more restricted conditions in their home country.77 As the sources concerning Czech and Moravian migration to South America indicate, upon returning, the migrants lacked “freedom” in a different sense—lowered social restraints and pressures, less cramped living conditions, and a sense of greater responsibility for one’s own life.

One finds explicit allusions to the lack of “freedom” and the discomforts of living in densely populated areas in the correspondence of returned migrants sent via the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute and implicit references in the memoirs of Matěj Poláček. In this sense, the feeling of being at “home” unexpectedly shifted overseas, throwing into doubt the notions maintained during the sojourns in America. A letter sent in 1929 by the Moravian returnee to compatriots in Argentina documents not only the intense communication with people oversees, the interchange of letters, and the frequent visits of relatives, but also the fact that even returning home and buying land was not necessarily a definite step. “How was the harvest? I am homesick for America, I liked it there, except for the flies. […] Here we are among strange people. […] When we tire from working for others, we will sell [what we have] here again and go over to you. […] The country is nice here, fields all flat, but more work than with the cotton over there.”78 The anonymous author of the letter still drew a distinction between “here” and “over there,” but her loyalties were not at all clear-cut. Poláček bought a “ranch” in Argentina, while also investing in real estate in his native village, manifesting fervent affection for his homeland. That he was prevented in 1946 from embarking again for South America and was subsequently deprived of part of his properties as a consequence of the rise to power of the communist regime is a different story.79 What is important in this context is the evident multiplicity of “homes” Poláček (along with hundreds or thousands of other Czechs and Moravians) was able to come to regard as “his,” a sentiment he was at least partially able to transmit to his surroundings, drawing the peripheral regions of Central Europe into the transatlantic economic and cultural interchange.

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